Re: UGLY_DEFS for darwin in configure.in

[Thomas Treichl]

John W. Eaton schrieb:
> On  3-Oct-2007, Thomas Treichl wrote:
>
> | Mac people should here again be part of the big Unix community as long as they 
> | are not able to build Octave with Mac's sed anymore and therefore they must 
> | install a newer version of sed and then the following special darwin lines don't 
> | work anymore:
> | 
> |    *-*-darwin*)
> |      UGLY_DEFS=`echo $DEFS | sed 
> 's,\\",\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\",g'`
> |    ;;
> |    *)
> |      UGLY_DEFS=`echo $DEFS | sed 's,\\",\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\",g'`
> |    ;;
>
> OK, so this is just another example of how testing for OS or version
> instead of the actual bug/broken feature is a bad idea.  So instead of
> this code, how about a feature test for sed that tests for the quoting
> problem?  If we remove this check, then I'm sure there will be some
> people still using the broken sed who will then complain to the list
> that they can't build Octave.  Or are you saying that doesn't matter
> now, that these systems are now the rare exception?
>
> jwe

Mac's original sed will definitely not work anymore for building Octave. Even if 
we get through ./configure we then will fail with the mkf77def script that 
produces 'empty output' if we call ./make in libcruft. So I'm 99.9% sure that 
'broken sed' will not work for building Octave on Mac. That's why every Mac user 
needs a new GNU/sed if he successfully wants to build Octave. My suggestion is 
to 'comment out' these lines, keep it for the next release and somewhen delete 
them completely if we don't hear anything on the list.

  Thomas