Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] user-definable tail and grep

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Salut!

Jean Delvare wrote:
> In order to get quilt to run on my Solaris 8 workstation, I would need
> to be able to tell it which tail [1] and grep binaries to use.
> Unfortunately, quilt's configure script doesn't let me do that. Attached
> is a patch addressing the problem. There are surprisingly few calls to
> tail and grep in the quilt scripts (2 and 8, respectively), so these
> changes are less intrusive that I would have first thought.
> 
> Still, given recent discussions about the best way to address
> incompatibility issues, these patches may be controversial, which is why
> I am posting them here first rather than applying them directly (as I'd
> have done a few days ago).

The normal approach is to allow the script user to override paths to
particular commands in the environment.  I was quite surprised to
see @COMMAND@ substitution hard coding scattered across the code rather
than something like this at the top of patchfns:

: ${TAIL="@TAIL@"}

Then for the rest of the scripts:

"$TAIL" -n 42 ...

Is this just an oversight?  Or is there a reason for that design?

> [1] Solaris' /usr/bin/tail doesn't support -n 42, it wants -42.
> Fortuntely enough, it also has /usr/xpg4/bin/tail, which does understand
> -n 42. But /usr/xpg4/bin isn't in the path by default, and I fear the
> consequences of adding it in front of my path, given that it contains
> similar replacements for many other commands, sometimes with
> incompatible command line options.

There is crack in /usr/xpg4/bin, libtool jumps through some hoops
to pick a couple of commands from there without putting it in the
path.  It's for this reason that I like darwin ports' policy of
using a g prefix for tools that are also in the standard path.  If
Sun had done that you could have safely put /usr/xpg4/bin at the
end of your path, and called xpgtail when you needed to, without
tripping over the xpg4 awk.

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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