Re: Fwd: sed porting trouble

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Jim,

> As you can see, my silence was not indicative of indifference
> or agreement ;-)

Then I misinterpreted it, sorry.

> I find it counter to the gnulib philosophy 
> to let a misfeature like the this evoke changes to so many files.
> Normally we try hard to make it so feature-poor systems do not
> evoke ugliness in the code we maintain, and we try even harder to
> avoid letting those systems induce a process burden (however small)
> on gnulib development.

I mostly agree with you, except for the detail that I count the
overall complexity of a patch, not how many files it touches. A patch
that applies the same change to 44 files is not so complex for me.

I agree with you
  - to avoid ugliness in the code,
  - to avoid introducing a process burden.

The patch I proposed and committed minimized both, because it merely
changed a 3-line idiom to a 4-line idiom. New .in.h files will
certainly be modeled on the existing ones, therefore a simple copy&paste
will produce the required new 4-line idiom.

> Thus, technically we must now remember that for each new
> @address@hidden .in.h file, we must also use @address@hidden
>
> That deserves a syntax-check rule in Makefile.

Thanks! I'm glad you think at installing these checks for the future, because
I never think at them.

Bruno