Re: Debian patches

[Jim Meyering]

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 03/07/2010 11:59 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> I too hesitate to commit to libtool for something so small and optional.
>> How about making this feature available only on systems that
>> provide working dlopen and shared library support?
>
> What about moving the "real" Perl grep to /usr/libexec/pgrep and
> making /usr/bin/grep exec it?  This way, grep could be moved to /bin
> while keeping the same absolute path.
>
> The feature should still be opt-out for people who do not want any
> absolute paths in the executable (likely Windows people), but it could
> be enabled by default and it would be portable.

"exec" feels like too large and expensive a hammer.
I really do like Perl regexps, and would probably use grep's -P
option frequently (command-line only, of course) if it were available.
For something so fundamental, I feel that we should not make everyone
pay a performance penalty (however small) for the sake of portability
to losing systems.

Besides, we should not make a high-level design sacrifice to
accommodate losing systems.
This is sort of like gnulib's motto: design for the better API,
and find/build a shim that lets losing systems get by.
Best to design once, well.  Losing systems will eventually
catch up -- or disappear.