Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 3/8] tac is not portable

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 15:36 +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> On Thursday 15 September 2005 13:15, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > There are other valid approaches. I would prefer that the tac
> > substitution is made at "build" time, just like we do for other
> > commands. Or we can provide a standalone tac script (your perl
> > one-liner) and copy it where quilt is installed if no tac binary if
> > found at configure time, as was discussed yesterday. Both solutions are
> > just fine as far as maintenance is concerned, and do not imply slowdowns
> > for other users.
> 
> It's fixed now by not using tac. The bash version shouldn't be measurably 
> slower than tac, and definitely not significantly.
> 
> > Another point to consider is that quilt is currently usable without perl.
> > No major command needs it as far as I can see. Some users may find it
> > valuable. Bringing in more perl into quilt is even questionable, as
> > quilt is supposed to be shell-based. If you want something totally
> > portable, perl is obviously the way to go, but you better rewrite quilt
> > entierly in perl then.
> 
> I would also prefer to not add more dependencies for the basic quilt 
> operations.
> 
> A complete Perl or Python rewrite would be nice and would allow to do a few 
> things better, but I consider that unlikely to happen.

If soneone does get ambitious enough to do this, my preference would be
in python.  I find it more readable than perl.  Plus, gquilt is already
written in python, so integration would be easy.

josh