Re: Add 'Required Tools' to README?

[Paul Eggert]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> Is it time to propose that cut and join be added

join perhaps; it's quite stable so long as you run it in the C locale
and stick to the old features.  cut I'm not so sure about; it's kind
of persnickety.

If we were adding portable tools, awk would be the first on my list.
(An amusing thing is that the GNU coding standards don't list 'awk'
but they have an example that uses gawk.  :-)

> There have been several 
> reports of slow shell algorithms, both with gnulib-tool and on the libtool 
> list, that would be improved if we could assume cut/join.

Awk's usually fast enough, in practice.

> Lately, many packages ship both .gz and .bz2 tarballs, although
> automake still defaults to .gz only.  Is it time to more heavily
> encourage .bz2?  Do we mention bzip2 in the gnulib dependencies?

Have the .bz2 patent issues been resolved?  (If not, we need to wait
until 17 years after bz2 was published.  Maybe longer.  :-)

> Also, should we mention git and/or CVS?

Perhaps.

Maybe also wget, since the sample bootstrap script uses wget.

This is starting to sound like an unbounded project....