Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 3/8] tac is not portable

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Thursday 15 September 2005 13:15, Jean Delvare wrote:
> There are other valid approaches. I would prefer that the tac
> substitution is made at "build" time, just like we do for other
> commands. Or we can provide a standalone tac script (your perl
> one-liner) and copy it where quilt is installed if no tac binary if
> found at configure time, as was discussed yesterday. Both solutions are
> just fine as far as maintenance is concerned, and do not imply slowdowns
> for other users.

It's fixed now by not using tac. The bash version shouldn't be measurably 
slower than tac, and definitely not significantly.

> Another point to consider is that quilt is currently usable without perl.
> No major command needs it as far as I can see. Some users may find it
> valuable. Bringing in more perl into quilt is even questionable, as
> quilt is supposed to be shell-based. If you want something totally
> portable, perl is obviously the way to go, but you better rewrite quilt
> entierly in perl then.

I would also prefer to not add more dependencies for the basic quilt 
operations.

A complete Perl or Python rewrite would be nice and would allow to do a few 
things better, but I consider that unlikely to happen.

-- Andreas.