Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > 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.
Alright; I'll make an extra effort to avoid non-portable Make assumptions then. It's just... portable Make _sucks_ (not that non-portable Make doesn't). >> 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. Given that there is no portable way to avoid newlines with echo, or to depend on the results of including a backslash in its argument, it may be hard to avoid, depending on what we need it for (with my last revision of the Make rule, however, I've avoided it for this specific purpose). Any modern Unix had pretty dang well include it. Non-modern Unixen won't generally be needing to bootstrap, I'd think (and probably already include older versions of wget anyway). Thanks for the input, Hrvoje. -- Micah J. Cowan Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer... http://micah.cowan.name/
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