Re: Using result of AC_PROG_SED as sed program in config.status

[Albert Chin]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 06:46:20PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> I'm following up to this proposed patch to Autoconf:
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2005-01/msg00038.html
> 
> which Albert Chin just pinged us about.  I'm a little reluctant to put
> this change in, as it will cause every "configure" command to look for
> a nice "sed", even programs that don't need one.  It might be better
> to do this only if the Autoconf user asks for it; or perhaps there's
> another way out (please see below).

Noone would use it if left up to the programmer. Autoconf already does
"additional" work like checking if header files are "usable" so this
doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. And, it's not adding much to
the execution time. Note, when using grep, autoconf already checks for
the "best" version on the system. As autoconf uses sed internally, why
shouldn't it also check for the "best" version?

However, it adds value only for Solaris 2.6 and 7, FAIK. I'm not going
to argue a lot for it. We'll just patch our distributed version.

> Albert Chin writes:
> 
> > Because some Makefile.in's can contain long lines (e.g. kdevelop from KDE),
> 
> This appears to me to be a portability bug in Automake and/or
> kdevelop, not in Autoconf per se.  POSIX says that Makefiles must be
> text files, that text files cannot contain lines longer than LINE_MAX
> bytes (counting the trailing newline), and that LINE_MAX might be as
> small as 2048.

I've emailed the automake people about having automake split long
lines. That would certainly be a good solution.

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)