Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > Micah Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> 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). > > It might be fine to require GNU make if there is a good reason for it > -- many projects do. But requiring random bits and pieces of the "GNU > toolchain", such as one or more of GNU Bash, GNU grep, GNU tar, or, > well, printf :-), in most cases simply causes annoyance for very > little added value. Junior developers, or those only exposed to > Linux, frequently simply assume that everyone has access to the tools > they use on their development system, and fail to document that > assumption. I'm sure we can do better than that.
Oh, I quite agree. Sorry, I should have been more clear. (And I still don't think "printf" should qualify as "part of the GNU toolchain" ;) ...it's been part of POSIX for a good long time.) I was mostly talking about GNU Make, I think, and little else. Basically, if it's not POSIX, I doubt I'll use it, and I'll tend to not use it beyond how POSIX says it should work, unless I _know_ that the extension I'm using is portable anyway. And even POSIX isn't perfect, many systems fail to conform to it in various ways. I was recently surprised to find that the awk Ubuntu ships with by default (mawk), does not support POSIX character classes ([[:space:]] etc), and had to modify the fun little script I use to colorize include the shell's joblist in the prompt (http://micah.cowan.name/hg/promptjobs/). -- Micah J. Cowan Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer... http://micah.cowan.name/
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