Re: how to detect broken install-sh?

[Robert Collins]

On Sun, 2009-09-27 at 16:00 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Sep 2009, Robert Collins wrote:
> >
> > I suggest dropping install-sh completely except for the coreutils
> > package. coreutils is very portable, so its not unreasonable to require
> > that it is installed to locally build and install other packages.
> > coreutils of course cannot depend on itself being installed. A more
> 
> This seems like a pretty unreasonable requirement to me.  The 
> install-sh strategy has been working for quite a long time with hardly 
> any complaint until today.

The landscape has changed though, and I suspect that if we gather stats
about this we'll see that install-sh is dead weight for most packages
nearly all of the time.

Its true that it is not a lot of dead weight, but at some point we
should be raising the bar - ever so slightly - on what we bundle into
the tarball. At one point we never required a Make implementation that
does includes, now we do [for dependency tracking] - and sure we degrade
well.

All I'm suggesting is that the time has come to let folk on the small
proportion of machines without a sufficiently useful install, build it -
exactly as they have to build any other dependency they are lacking.

BTW, on solaris, /usr/ucb/install is apparently the right thing to use,
and has been there since SunOS 5.10  Last Revised 14 Sep 1992 :).

-Rob

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