On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net>wrote:
> > Looking in sage-env I see: > > if [ "$MKDIR" = "" ]; then > MKDIR="mkdir" > fi > > if [ "$CHMOD" = "" ]; then > CHMOD="chmod" > fi > > if [ "$TOUCH" = "" ]; then > TOUCH="touch" > fi > > if [ "$MV" != "" ]; then > MM="$MV" > fi > > if [ "$CP" = "" ]; then > CP="cp" > fi > > > I'm wondering if this is really necessary to have these environment > variables. I might have been the one guilty of adding these to sage-env, > as I did work on it years ago, but I'm wondering now if we need these to > be user definable, or just use 'cp', 'mkdir' etc in scripts? > It turns out that we don't. That was unclear in 2005. It used to be that I used a lot of Linux-ism's, e.g., "cp -a", etc., and an initial idea about how to get around that was to (1) continue with Linux-ism's "$CP -a", but on systems that don't support -a make sure that $CP does the equivalent thing. This approach is too unfamiliar and confusing to the large number of people that do small amounts of work on spkg's; also, rightfully so, people have generally been much more interested (and enthusiastic) about eliminating all GNU-ism's from spkg-install's. > > I'd propose deleting these, then of course testing that none are > actually used. > I agree with your proposal. William > > In the case of 'make' and 'tar' I think there are good reasons for using > the environment variables, as there are often different versions of make > and tar around, but I'm not so sure with the very basic commands. > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
