Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 5/8]

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Jean Delvare wrote:
> Hi Gary,

Salut!

> [Gary V. Vaughan]
> 
>>(...)  Long term, I'd like to try and
>>remove the dependency on coreutils altogether... depending on bash is
>>fine, perl not so bad, coreutils bearable, but GNU sed, GNU awk, GNU
>>getopt (and any others that may creep in) is unnecessary.  The larger
>>the dependency stack, the harder it is to install on non-Linux.
> 
> I don't quite agree. OK, sometimes removing dependencies on
> Linux-specific features or tools is easy and wanted, just like Andreas
> did with tac. However, some platforms come with core utils that have
> very, very poor command line interfaces, so hoping to get quilt to work
> with these out of the box promises large code rewrites and bad
> consequences on the code size, readability and maintenability.

Oh there are certainly pathological cases that should be avoided.  But
oftentimes adding a line or two of extra code to remove a dependency is
a win overall.  AIX will likely prove really hard to port to for
example, without first having to port GNU getopt, gawk, GNU sed,
coreutils and finding a perl package.

If it turns out to be easy to fall back to something else (or just do
something differently to save that pain), it increases the potential
audience of a project.

> Writing a shell-based tool is hard enough with quality core utils, it
> sounds like a very bad trip with poor ones, so we are probably not going
> anywhere trying to strip every util's use down to the common set of
> options - which I repeat will be very thin if the set of platforms is
> large.

ACK.  My viewpoint is probably quite skewed after so many years of
working around various vendor Bourne shell bugs with libtool...

> So it sounds reasonable to me to have quilt depend on reasonably
> advanced utils. People who want to use quilt have to install these
> utils, it's not that hard. If you don't want quilt to depend on
> anything, the way to go is a rewrite in perl or python, as was suggested
> in another thread.

ACK.

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

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