Simon Josefsson wrote:
> I'm concerned about rewriting efforts, they tend to never get finished.
Right. And the target of the rewrite should be something that is not
changing rapidly. Because users in the year 2040 should be able to take
a tarball packaged in 2030 and configure and build it. This means, it
should be something that is standardized, not something new that is
rapidly changing (like 'zig' for example).
With these requirements (standardized and easy to bootstrap, unlike Perl
or Python), there's not much left besides the Bourne shell.
> That's fine, and with Paul's patch it is now clear that Autoconf depends
> on sed during runtime of generated ./configure.
Regarding documentation, we may do more:
- Either by adding a DEPENDENCIES file to each package, that - like the
gnulib/DEPENDENCIES - lists
- A shell
- Core POSIX utilities
- The comparison utilities 'cmp' and 'diff'
- Grep
- Awk
- sed
- Or by a per-platform documentation:
- On RHEL, clones, and Fedora, do yum -y install make gcc diffutils
- On Alpine Linux, do apk add coreutils make gcc
- On Cygwin, install gcc-core make
> 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.
That's a pointless effort. When I did that for the 'join' program
(missing on Alpine Linux), that was already a waste of time. It is a
better use of our time to just document "on Alpine Linux, install coreutils
first".
Bruno
