Re: 'tar' in the GNU Coding Standards

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Thanks for writing.
>
>     I believe 'tar' should removed from that list, but allow someone to
>     select a variable for 'tar'.
>
> In typical Makefiles tar is already a variable, as are others in that
> list.  I'm not sure that we need to standardize the variable names for
> them ...
>
> Ralf, wdyt?
>
> Thanks,
> Karl

The piece above this says:


"The configure script and the Makefile rules for building and installation 
should not use any utilities directly except these: "

so this is not only Makefiles, but configure scripts too.

I've seen several makefiles and scripts over the years where 'tar' is hard-coded 
in, which will cause problems in some cases.

It should also be noted that egrep is not required to be installed on any system 
conforming to POSIX 2004.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/

If the intension is to write portable programs, one can't rely on using the 
latest standards, but even the 2008 POSIX specification

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

does not require egrep. I learned that from reading the autoconf manual!

grep -E is supposed to support extended regular expressions (and GNU's grep 
does), though according to the autoconf manual, not all greps conform to POSIX 
and so therefore they do not all support grep -E.



Dave