Re: Automake patch to not assume egrep or fgrep

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Ralf Corsepius <address@hidden>
> Date: 30 May 2002 09:02:42 +0200
> 
> your patch now hard-codes grep -E and grep -F into several
> general automake-files (some annotations interspersed below).

It does this only in maintainer actions.  These actions already assume
GNU grep; for example, they use the ERE '\bsleep +1\b' which is
portable neither to POSIX 'grep -E' nor to traditional 'egrep'.
GNU grep supports -E and -F, so it shouldn't make matters worse to
assume grep -E and grep -F here.

> Why not implementing a general AC_PROG_FGREP and AC_PROG_EGREP into
> autoconf

I recently added those two macros to the Autoconf CVS.  But I found
that I didn't really need them to fix Automake, so I didn't use them.
I suppose it might clean up the Automake code slightly to use them.
But this can wait until after the next Autoconf release is out.