Re: AC_PROG_SED selecting correct sed for config.status

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 10:21:09AM -0600, Albert Chin wrote:
> > Have you encountered any problem on a particular platform?
> 
> Yes. When building kdevelop from kde-3.3.2 on Solaris 2.6, 7,
> substitions in Makefile.in's with long lines gets truncated resulting
> in a dead build.

OK, so this means that the problem should be solved.

> I'm gonna work on this now and come up with a patch.

Great, thank you.

> > It's not just _AC_OUTPUT_CONFIG_STATUS which uses ``sed'', there are
> > more macros.

I wasn't clear at this point.  I meant macros which are not called from
_AC_OUTPUT_CONFIG_STATUS, for example AC_OUTPUT_MAKE_DEFS at the end
of status.m4.  And quick grep find more files:
lib/autoconf/headers.m4
lib/autoconf/c.m4
lib/autoconf/fortran.m4
lib/autoconf/functions.m4
lib/autoconf/general.m4
lib/autoconf/status.m4
lib/autoconf/lang.m4
lib/autoconf/libs.m4
lib/autoconf/programs.m4
lib/autotest/general.m4
lib/m4sugar/m4sh.m4

But I still think that plain ``sed'' is more readable than ``$SED'', so
it may be better to use $SED only in nontrivial cases.

Commands like ``hostname | sed 1q'' shoudl be portable enough, because
the sed program is trivial and the input line is short.

But perhaps I'm wrong and it's simpler to replace all occurences of sed,
(taking care of the beginning of the configure script, of course).

Thank you very much for the analysis of this problem.

Yours,
        Stepan Kasal