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

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Dean,

[Dean Roehrich]
> I don't quite see why you would do this without also testing for a specific
> feature.  You want a tail that supports -n; there's no point in accepting
> anything else.  You also want a grep that supports...hmm, lots of things
> that Solaris' /usr/bin/grep and /usr/xpg4/bin/grep don't provide--you want
> gnu grep.

Letting the user choose binaries and testing these binaries features are
mostly unrelated features. We are already letting the user choose
binaries for bash, perl, sed, awk, mktemp, diff, patch, diffstat and the
MTA. Of these, only mktemp, patch and diffstat are vaguely tested. It
makes sense to test features even if binary location cannot be chosen.
It makes sense to let the user change the binary location and not test
it.

Now, of course, I agree that doing both is better. Attached is a patch
adding a test for tail -n in configure. While I was there, I did a
second patch adding tests for grep -v, -q, -e and -E, which are the four
grep options quilt needs. Comments welcome. Hopefully this will help us
detect broken utils before running the test suite. Each patch goes on
top of the patch adding the corresponding --with-foo.

We might consider adding similar tests for sed, awk, patch and diff.

BTW, /usr/xpg4/bin/grep seems to work for me. I have a GNU diff at hand
in case things go wrong though.

> The number of --with-foo switches which would be required on something
> like Solaris...not pretty.

That's true, I have 7 of these already...

Thanks,
--
Jean Delvare

quilt-CVS-configure.ac-test-tail.diff.txt
Description: Text document

quilt-CVS-configure.ac-test-grep.diff.txt
Description: Text document