[Quilt-dev] Re: quilt on SuSE 7.2 and Windows

[John Vandenberg]

On 7/26/05, Jean Delvare <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> [Andreas Gruenbacher]
> > As long as the patches don't badly mess up the code or slow things
> > down too badly, I think we will accept UNIX patches, yes.
> >
> > Porting quilt to Windows sounds more like an exercise in masochism:
> > quilt relies on the UNIX toolchain a lot and Windows has much slower
> > process startup times, so quilt will never run well as far as I can
> > see. I'm not sure we should even bother. I'll surely take obvious
> > things, and things that won't hurt otherwise.
> 
> I totally second Andreas on both points.

Hi Jean,

I don't mind if the Windows parts of the patch series are ignored for
the moment, but as a large percentage of the patches are applicable
for any older platform, it would be nice to see them reviewed and
checked in.

> I would myself be interested in porting quilt to Solaris, although I
> lack the time to do so right now.

Solaris is another platform I use regularly for development, and I can
report I have all tests passing except one.test and two.test.  At the
moment, this is using either gcc or cc to compile, and GNU tools for
everything else, with the only change from the versions used on SuSE
7.2 being gawk 3.0.3, a dot point earlier.

I am not particularilty interested in supporting the Solaris awk, sed,
diff or patch, but if anyone has a reason why this would be useful, I
can look into it.

An updated set of patches to include Solaris are here:

http://zeroj.hda0.net/quilt-patches/

With this changeset, quilt's dependencies on `column' and `getopt' are
now optional, as Solaris and Windows doesn't have either.

> Please keep in mind that it is always possible to install newer versions
> of bash, sed, gawk and others to a separate location and have quilt (and
> only quilt if you want so) use them.

In large multi-user systems with strict a SOE this translates into
many users having to install everything in $HOME, and then often
having multiple copies of each.

> This is certainly a better approach
> to getting quilt to run on older Linux systems or non-Linux systems than
> messing up with quilt's code, which I think is quite good right now, to
> make it support older tools. I did install a separate bash on my Linux
> system to workaround the broken pipe problem, and if I ever get to
> installing it on Solaris, I'll start by installing updated versions of
> everything it needs, as I know that Solaris sed, nawk etc. lack most
> features quilt needs.

Let me know what you think of the patches; if they degrade the style
or quality, I will look for more acceptable solutions.  Also, I am
happy to run regression tests against a number of platforms whenever a
release is being scheduled to check if any new issues have cropped up.

In the majority of the problems that I have encountered, the portions
that are not backwards compatible are also bugs.  for example,
configure.ac checks the bash version is 2.04, and when it doesn't find
one, it tells the user to download 2.04; the user will then have to
figure out why diff complains bitterly, and then upgrade to 2.05.  The
workaround for this problem is to use standard syntax, which is
shorter and IMO more readable as the pipe flows from top -> bottom;
right -> left.  And then throughout the code base, there are
assumptions that /bin/sh is bash, or that bash is in the path rather
than where it was told to find it using --with-bash=/path/to/bash.

Cheers,
John