Re: how to detect broken install-sh?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Robert Collins wrote:

> > Maybe the landscape has changed for you, but not necessarily for
> > everyone.  Installing "coreutils" could be quite a burden and the
> > tools might conflict with the OS-provided equivalents.
>
> I'm not a strong enough believer in the Copenhagen school to think that
> I'm in a different universe. I'll agree that the distribution of OSs is
> different for each open source project. But - data needed - for either
> of us to reason effectively on this. As far as conflicting, there are
> multiple well established places to install things that won't
> conflict: /opt /usr/local ~/local - plus you can just make one up and
> put it in your path.

There are really only two approaches which work.  One is the 
"portable" approach taken now.  The other is to require installation 
of a full GNU toolset and radically simplify Autoconf, Automake, and 
Libtool so they only need to work with this toolset.  Installing 
coreutils is a substantial step toward installing a full GNU toolset.

> Thats the key number - the amount of benefit that install-sh gives you.

This violates a core principle of GNU in that "benefits" should be for 
the benefit of the recipients of the software rather than for the for 
the developers of it.  GNU is a communistic/Marxist type model rather 
than a capitalistic model.  In the old days, the benefits were for the 
developers and the users had to muddle through a difficult procedure 
for every package that they installed.

To be sure, I will be quite supportive of a build framework if it is 
based on a small package which is easily installed, and the build no 
longer needs to be cobbled together with a mismash of Unix utilities. 
Of course this build environment needs to be self-contained, well 
supported, and would probably take five or seven years to fully 
develop.  There have been a number of independent attempts in this 
direction but it seems that none has come close to the popularity of 
autotools.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/