On Fri, Apr 18, 2025, at 12:48 PM, Simon Josefsson via Bug reports for autoconf wrote: > "Zack Weinberg" <z...@owlfolio.org> writes: I think the main aspect > here is to see if we can find unnecessary dependencies on some tools, > and fix them. Sometimes code that rely on 'cmp' or 'diff' can be > rewritten in some other style.
I want to reiterate here that if Fedora (or any other corporate entity) sees value in this work getting done, then they need to either do it themselves or pay someone to do it. I am not going to work on this (except *maybe* the grep part) unless I get paid to do it and I doubt anyone else is either. > I think we have come to the point where it is only reasonable to > assume /bin/sh and that it supports some reasonable subset of POSIX > shell semantics. Anything beyond that needs to be documented as a > buildtime or runtime dependency. I have experimental Guix containers > where /bin/sh is Gash and common Unix tools are from Gash-Utils. It > doesn't run ./configure well yet, but I suppose it is only a matter > of time. That's fine, but... > One way around this is to implement a limited awk in POSIX shell. For > the features of awk that Autoconf needs. Has anyone looked into that? > 'shawk'? I think you are underestimating how limited the string manipulation capabilities are, of the POSIX shell subset that Autoconf is restricted to, in the absence of awk. I think this hypothetical 'shawk' would be a *harder* task than converting all the existing unconditional uses of awk to use sed instead. zw
