Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 5/8]

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Gary,

[Gary V. Vaughan]
> (...)  Long term, I'd like to try and
> remove the dependency on coreutils altogether... depending on bash is
> fine, perl not so bad, coreutils bearable, but GNU sed, GNU awk, GNU
> getopt (and any others that may creep in) is unnecessary.  The larger
> the dependency stack, the harder it is to install on non-Linux.

I don't quite agree. OK, sometimes removing dependencies on
Linux-specific features or tools is easy and wanted, just like Andreas
did with tac. However, some platforms come with core utils that have
very, very poor command line interfaces, so hoping to get quilt to work
with these out of the box promises large code rewrites and bad
consequences on the code size, readability and maintenability.

Writing a shell-based tool is hard enough with quality core utils, it
sounds like a very bad trip with poor ones, so we are probably not going
anywhere trying to strip every util's use down to the common set of
options - which I repeat will be very thin if the set of platforms is
large.

So it sounds reasonable to me to have quilt depend on reasonably
advanced utils. People who want to use quilt have to install these
utils, it's not that hard. If you don't want quilt to depend on
anything, the way to go is a rewrite in perl or python, as was suggested
in another thread.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare