On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Robert Collins wrote:
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.
Maybe the landscape has changed for you, but not necessarily for everyone. Installing "coreutils" could be quite a burden and the tools might conflict with the OS-provided equivalents.
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.
The make implementation that does includes is only for developers of the package. It is not necessary to have a fancy make to build the software.
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.
What other dependency might they be lacking? My own package is quite large but all of the dependencies are optional.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
