Re: sed vs. gsed

[c.]

On 19 Sep 2016, at 20:13, Sebastian Schöps <address@hidden> wrote:

> Rik-4 wrote
>> But I realize that might be too big a change.  If we stay with the current
>> system, then why not just require the GNU variants of sed and awk?  We
>> already require GNU Make, for example.  Basically, there's a lot of
>> scripts
>> that I don't feel like re-writing to remove the use of GNU regexp.  Not
>> only would this take time away from more useful Octave tasks (since our
>> volunteer time is finite), but it would also potentially introduce new
>> bugs
>> in the build system which would then need to be debugged, taking yet more
>> developer time.
> 
> I agree but then configure should properly detect gawk and gsed and complain
> if they were not found. Furthermore, it should be made sure that octave is
> actually using the detected binaries, i.e., not some sed or awk that happens
> to be in the path :) 
> 
> I think I proposed this in some of the threads on "odepkg on Mac" where I
> came across the gawk problem (which throws at least an error message during
> configure). 
> 
> Bye
> Sebastian

Yes, 

I agree with Sebastian, it is not such a big hassle to require gsed+gawk,
what causes a big deal of problems is that there is no check in configure to
make sure the detected sed+awk have the required features.

So we should decide whether any sed or gawk will do or, if we require a specific
version, we should check that version is actually available.

c.