On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 03:04:20PM +0200, Julien T. Letessier wrote:

> That's the idea -- originally tools.mk was written by Grant in response 
> to pkg/17776, which addressed the issue of Solaris' 'grep' not beeing 
> good enough.
> 
> IMO a proper use of tools.mk is the following:
> 
> .include "../../mk/tools.mk"
> 
> .if ${OPSYS} == "SunOS"
> # Sun's "sed" cant' handle enough command-line arguments
> USE_GNU_TOOLS+=	sed
> .endif
> 
> Does this seem prudent enough?

that still requires us to make changes to any number of pkg Makefiles,
which is the reason I decided against this approach. the decisions to
use the appropriate tools should be made by pkgsrc infrastructure (not
individual pkgs) to ensure there is a consistent environment and that
there is minimal maintenance burden.

> >Besides, if you've got to change all occurances of USE_GMAKE into
> >USE_GNU_TOOLS+=make then you've only wasted everyone's time and energy
> >for zero gain.  Just leave USE_GMAKE alone and hide the magic to
> >implement it in the one place it's necessary. 

this comment is illogical (I realise this wasn't you, Julien). we are
replacing it with a far more flexible way to require third party tools.
we enhance functionality and deprecate internal variables in pkgsrc
all the time. this is no different.

g.