Micah Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I may take liberties with the Make environment, and assume the > presence of a GNU toolset, though I'll try to avoid that where it's > possible.
Requiring the GNU toolset puts a large burden on the users of non-GNU systems (both free and non-free ones). Please remember that for many Unix users and sysadmins Wget is one of the core utilities, to be compiled very soon after a system is set up. Each added build dependency makes Wget that much harder to compile on a barebones system. > In cases like this, printf is much more portable (in behavior) than > echo, but not as dependable (on fairly old systems) for presence; > however, it's not a difficult tool to obtain, and I wouldn't mind > making it a prerequisite for Wget (on Unix systems, at any rate). In > a pinch, one could write an included tool (such as an "echo" command > that does precisely what we expect) to help with building. But > basically, if it's been in POSIX a good while, I'll probably expect > it to be available for the Unix build. Such well-intended reasoning tends to result with a bunch reports about command/feature X not being present on the reporter's system, or about a bogus version that doesn't work being picked up, etc. But maybe the times have changed -- we'll see.
