Hello Vincent,
I'd like to give a bit wider context to the problem you reported,
please bear with me.
One of the goals of Autoconf is to make the configure script portable
to a wide variety of platforms. To achieve that, Autoconf often has
to work around a known bug of a system. But that does not mean
Autoconf should collect workarounds for every bug it encounters.
The reasons include that maintaining such a collection takes some
time (of developer work) and that using that full collection means
the generated configure script is longer, slower, and also
harder-to-decipher for the poor people who open it in an editor...
If there is a bug on a system by a huge vendor, which is reluctant to
fix it, or if users are not able to upgrade to a fixed version, for
whatever reason, then it is crucial to work around that bug to enable
autoconfiscated projects to be built on those systems.
If, on the other extreme, a student developing His Own Best
GNU/Linux Distribution makes a mistake, then he should rather fix
that mistake, and the consumers of His Own shall rather upgrade.
So in each case, we have to ask where on the spectrum the problem is.
In the case of missing diff, where s/diff /cmp / is a working fix, it
would sufice to add an alias or link diff -> cmp.
If I understand it correctly, then the busybox version of ls does not
support the full set of options; likewise, this diff would not
support the various output formats, but it would set the exit code
correctly.
If the users of Maemo are not doomed to use a particular old
version and can regularly update to current version, then they have a
reasonable way to get the fixed environment. Under that assumption,
the problem is not of the kind which Autoconf is forced to
circumvent.
I hope you understand that I do not want to be unhelpful; I just
want to find the optimal solution for the whole user base.
BTW: does Maemo contain awk? The upcoming release of Autoconf is
going to use it for instantiation of files nd headers, so virtually
every autoconf-2.62-generated configure is going to require awk for
its operation.
Have a nice day,
Stepan Kasal
