On Sun, 2009-09-27 at 16:00 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Sun, 27 Sep 2009, Robert Collins wrote: > > > > I suggest dropping install-sh completely except for the coreutils > > package. coreutils is very portable, so its not unreasonable to require > > that it is installed to locally build and install other packages. > > coreutils of course cannot depend on itself being installed. A more > > This seems like a pretty unreasonable requirement to me. The > install-sh strategy has been working for quite a long time with hardly > any complaint until today.
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. Its true that it is not a lot of dead weight, but at some point we should be raising the bar - ever so slightly - on what we bundle into the tarball. At one point we never required a Make implementation that does includes, now we do [for dependency tracking] - and sure we degrade well. All I'm suggesting is that the time has come to let folk on the small proportion of machines without a sufficiently useful install, build it - exactly as they have to build any other dependency they are lacking. BTW, on solaris, /usr/ucb/install is apparently the right thing to use, and has been there since SunOS 5.10 Last Revised 14 Sep 1992 :). -Rob
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