Re: [PATCH] Use find ... | xargs rm -f instead of find ... -delete

[Matthias Kilian]

[this is becoming slightly offtopic, but anyway...]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 08:19:57PM +0000, Graham Percival wrote:
> > > > -       find $(outdir)/offline-root -type l -delete
> > > > +       find $(outdir)/offline-root -type l | xargs rm -f
[...]
> > The `-delete' primary isn't very portable, it's a GNU extension.
> 
> IMHO, that's all we need to hear.  -delete must be removed.

`must' is such a strong word. There are other GNUisms (or non-portable
extensions) hidden in the build system, like that `grep -L' at some
places.

If you guys hesitate to apply patches like the one I sent (and David
is right in that my patch introduces a potential risk), that's
perfectly ok for me. I've two branches on my disk: `mystuff'
(containing patches I think may be helpful for all systems), and
`openbsdhacks' (copntaining additional patches I need to get LilyPond
built on OpenBSD, and that are probably less important for you). I
could just move the find(1) diff to my `openbsdhacks' branch.

> > > and less secure
> > > (if somebody places files with spaces or newlines into the latter
> > > directory, things may get ugly).
> 
> That's a fairly esoteric concern; I can't imagine anybody having
> the lilypond build tree in a world-writeable location unless they
> also had the source tree in a world-writeable location.  If they
> did that (say, a shared computer where the users trusted each
> other), then there's many other ways to do nasty stuff (like
> changing the makefiles themselves).

Yes, but David is right in that my patch was spreading bad practice.

It's probably an esoteric issue for LilyPond, but someone may copy
and use this unsafe command for his own project or in some random
shell script.

Ciao,
        Kili