Hi - > Frank, do you have details of those real platforms with missing diff? > As I wrote in <https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?111044>, it's > difficult to implement this kind of sanity check without access to an > environment that *fails* this kind of sanity check. I could set one up > myself but I wouldn't know if I had picked the right things to leave out.
Not a live system I use day-to-day. But I mean I can remove "diffutils" from my Fedora box, and see it break. I think the point was not so much that normal & typical developer systems may fail. It's that unforseen restricted machines (maybe running in minimal fashionably-"secure" buildroots) could encounter these problems, and then QUIETLY FAIL by misconfiguring tools. Thus the idea was just to do lightweight & obvious sanity checking on the environment at configure startup. e.g.: diff /dev/null /dev/null || exit 1 - FChE