Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] user-definable tail and grep

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Thursday 15 September 2005 23:04, Jean Delvare wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In order to get quilt to run on my Solaris 8 workstation, I would need
> to be able to tell it which tail [1] and grep binaries to use.
> Unfortunately, quilt's configure script doesn't let me do that. Attached
> is a patch addressing the problem. There are surprisingly few calls to
> tail and grep in the quilt scripts (2 and 8, respectively), so these
> changes are less intrusive that I would have first thought.
>
> Still, given recent discussions about the best way to address
> incompatibility issues, these patches may be controversial, which is why
> I am posting them here first rather than applying them directly (as I'd
> have done a few days ago).

No objections from my side. We can always convert those two substitutions to 
something better later.

> My opinion is that alternative compatibility solutions (such as a
> separate subdirectory with replacement stuff, to be prepended to quilt's
> $PATH) have only been mentioned but nothing is currently implemented
> AFAIK, and it may take some time before something is.

It's totally trivial, but I thought we might want to see if somebody comes up 
with objections.

> [1] Solaris' /usr/bin/tail doesn't support -n 42, it wants -42.
> Fortuntely enough, it also has /usr/xpg4/bin/tail, which does understand
> -n 42.

I agree with Dean's point about tail -n option testing, so that would make a 
nice addition.

Thanks,
Andreas.