Re: [patch] Keep sanity in autotools

[Bruce Korb]

Eric Sunshine wrote:
> 
> Jan Kratochvil wrote:
> > Just a try - this is also forbidden?: if ls -ld $f | grep -q '^...x'; then
> 
> The grep -q option is unportable.  Autoconf works around this issue by....
> 
> The '^' and '.' tokens in the grep expression also are not....  Instead,
> usage would have to be conditionalized based upon the result of
> AC_PROG_EGREP.
> 
> Finally, use of "ls -ld" may or may not be acceptable.....

This is plain nutty.  Not that you don't have to work around portability
problems, but _surely_ "the community" can agree that there has to be
some sort of limit to the convolutions that one embeds into every project.
It seemed clear to me 6 years ago that that point had been reached.
What is terribly wrong with requiring a minimalist install environment
pre-installed?  You know, autoconf checks for it and if it has not been
installed and echo and grep don't work, then just choke and die.  How many
programmer hours are squandered hassling over silly things that were
fixed 20 years ago?  At what point are hobbiest platforms dropped so
that programmers can presume target platforms that are less than a decade
old?  Sheesh!  What a waste of time.