Re: How to check for a GNU userland

[Andreas Schuldei]

* Jimmy Kaplowitz (address@hidden) [020126 21:19]:
> The uname command will not in any
> way reflect GNU or Debian, since we will be using NetBSD's kernel. So,
> what is the best way to check for the GNU userland tools? 

This is also a major pain for debian/OpenBSD, which tries to keep
the OpenBSD userland in takt as much as possible for security
reasons, if not other desired (e.g. by installing wu-ftp).

I have reached the conclusion that this can only be solved by
individual checks in the configure scripts, for the presence of
the individual features you need (are certain command line
switches accepted? How does this command behave?) Some commands
are especially creepy, because they behave differently, even
without any switches, xargs for example.

In the openbsd port I wrote wrappers around the tools, which are
looking at an environment variable and call the specified
toolchain's command. This is possible, because in different
phases of a buildprocess of a package ONLY GNU or ONLY BSD tools
are expected. Actually all 'native' debian packages require for
example GNU make and
the whole openbsd source tree the openbsd make. One has to
clean/set the environment variabel to get debian packages build
of bsd sources.