Re: how to detect broken install-sh?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Robert Collins wrote on Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 11:40:31PM CEST:
> The landscape has changed though, and I suspect that if we gather stats
> about this we'll see that install-sh is dead weight for most packages
> nearly all of the time.

The statistics are that <15K of code text is nearly negligible for most
packages, and getting more and more negligible in terms of disk space
availability every day.

Both disk space and compute power are still growing rapidly.  As long
as the set of workarounds for system bugs and limitations grows less
quickly, and they are mostly orthogonal and do not require too much
maintenance work on the developer part, the marginal cost of keeping
some workaround is negligible.

So unless the number of problem reports that developers have with
install-sh grows dramatically, I see no reason to drop it.

You're much better off arguing that packages update to Autoconf 2.64,
in many cases the configure script will shrink by more than 15K over
the one generated by 2.63 (and it'll be a bit faster, too).

Cheers,
Ralf