On Jul 11, 2003, at 08:46, grant beattie  was heard saying:

> we need to identify every package which needs it, and as packages get
> updated, they may "silently" break -- breakage that may not be picked
> up, as sometimes the package continues to build, leaving it OK as far
> as pkgsrc is concerned, but with internal breakage present.

Not sure about that -- IMO using the gnu versions of {awk,sed,...} will always
be better than using the SunOS versions. Except if you have counter-examples.

> as we all know, /usr/bin/{awk,sed} on Solaris are insufficient for
> pkgsrc use, and for a lot of individual packages, too.
>
> where we know certain tools are insufficient, yet a suitable version
> exists elsewhere (eg. nawk, xpg4, etc.), we should unconditionally
> link these into the buildlink/bin directory. this means splitting
> some of g{awk,sed}/buildlink2.mk out into mk/.

Though it might be a lot of work, this is seducing. Perhaps something a la
pthread could be suitable, e.g.

.include "../../mk/awk.mk"
USE_AWK=		# defined
REQUIRE_AWK=		{gnu,native}

or even

.include "../../mk/bsd.tools.mk"
USE_TOOL+=		awk
REQUIRE_TOOL.awk=	{gnu,native}

The advantage is that it's generalizable to more tools as necessary. For
instance, I remember stumbling on a package that requires GNU 'tr' (I can find
which if you need me to). 'grep' might be a good example too.

> I will look at doing this shortly, unless there are alternative
> approaches I haven't yet heard? :-)

If anyone has something simpler, I'd be glad to know ;)

If SunOS is the only OS where these problems occur, a simple though ugly
solution is possible to just inconditionnaly link *all* of the GNU coreutils,
gawk and gsed into .buildlink/bin for (every?) package, just on SunOS.

Cheers,
-- 
Julien T. Letessier              aim:jletessier
Graduate ENSIMAG Student         http://www.mezis.net
CLIPS-IMAG DEA Intern            mailto:contact(at)mezis.net

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