Re: About Section 7.2.2 "Utilities in Makefiles" of the GCS

[Karl Berry]

    * The list of utilities includes "diff". But unfortunately, "diff"
    is not present on the Maemo/OS2008 GNU/Linux distribution (e.g. on
    the Nokia N810), probably to save some space. 

How unfortunate.  Is there any chance of having that decision changed?

    Very often, one just needs to know whether two files are identical
    or different, in which case "cmp" could be used. But it has been
    reported that "cmp" has problems on some platforms,

Ralf (or anyone), do you know what these cmp "problems" are on "some
platforms"?  Oh well, I suppose there is no hope of fixing them, anyway.

    so that "cmp" is no longer used by autoconf. Could something be said
    about that? Is one of them preferred, to detect whether two files
    are identical or different?  

I don't know what could be said.  The Autoconf folks are in the best
position to know what works most widely.
    
    Could it be advised to test the presence of "diff", and use "cmp" if
    "diff" couldn't be found?

Well, that sounds like a sensible approach on the face of it.  I don't
think that standards.texi should make it mandatory, but it could be a
suggestion/explanation.  Ralf?

In general, all bets are off when the "required" utilities aren't
present anyway.  I don't know why both diff and cmp got in the list
originally.

thanks,
k