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

[Paul Eggert]

Albert Chin <address@hidden> writes:

> And, it's not adding much to the execution time.

It's not an execution-time issue; "configure" is already so slow that
I doubt whether anyone would notice the difference.  It's a stability
issue.  I would rather not automatically substitute some other "sed"
and possibly break something.

Part of my reluctance is that I have my doubts about these "nicer"
seds that lack line limits.  On Solaris 2.6 and 7, for example, my
experience was that the "nicer" sed wasn't tested or maintained as
much.

I no longer have access to these older hosts, so I can't test my vague
recollections directly.  However, I just Googled for the problem and
found the following web page at the top of the list:

http://www.net-snmp.org/docs/README.solaris.html

It says "/usr/xpg4/bin/sed is seen to segfault under Solaris 8 when
running configure.  Putting /usr/bin ahead of /usr/xpg4/bin fixes
this."  This may help to explain why I'm reluctant to encourage the
use of /usr/xpg4/bin/sed on Solaris.

> Note, when using grep, autoconf already checks for the "best"
> version on the system.

But that is for Autoconf's use itself, which is a different story.
Here we are talking about the "configure" and "config.status" scripts
that Autoconf generate; they have more portability constraints.