[ On Monday, October 6, 2003 at 17:07:27 (GMT), Christos Zoulas wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVS commit: src/gnu/dist/gawk
>
> But as for the amount of work that it will
> take to use nawk as a gawk replacement, I am pretty sure it is
> substantial.

As far as I know there are no changes necessary in the base OS to use
the latest One True Awk from bwk as a replacement for gawk in the base
OS, at least not in 1.6.x.  I've not had gawk in my base OS since 1.3.3.

> Consider the packages that use it...

Very few (1?[*]) of the awk-using packages I've installed and used actually
require gawk.  (though I've only ever installed and used a few hundred
packages so I can't claim to know about _all_ of them :-))

BUT:  Packages can easily depend on lang/gawk and most I've looked at
can explicitly use "gawk" (i.e. instead of "awk") to ensure they get a
compatible interpreter.

(Also note that many of the so-called features unique to gawk that
people most often make use of are strictly unnecessary and can almost
mechanically be rewritten to use only standard awk features.)

[*] Though I don't seem to have any gawk-requiring packages installed at
the moment:

	$ /usr/sbin/pkg_info -R gawk 
	Information for gawk-3.1.1nb1:
	

but I have done a bit of a cleanup on my development machine and I have
very few packages installed right now:

	$ /usr/sbin/pkg_info | wc -l 
	     216

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						Greg A. Woods

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