Re: [gentoo-dev] perl, sed and non-gsed

[Stephen Bennett <spb@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 17:23 +0200, Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 March 2005 06:58, Aaron Walker wrote:
> > FYI Ciaran and Diego, sed is aliased to gsed on BSD.
> I know, but this is, imho, an ugly workaround :)

It's an ugly workaround, and one that i'd like to remove if possible.
Right now that's a fairly big 'if', but one possible way to do it
suggests itself:

- Modify the sed ebuild to install a gsed -> sed symlink on GNU systems.
- Fix sed usages in the tree where that's practical / easy (such as -i /
-e argument ordering). Otherwise, explicitly call gsed if we need GNU
extensions that aren't present in BSD / others.
- Remove the alias in non-gnu systems' profile.bashrcs.

As ciaranm said earlier, GNU sed does have a lot of useful extensions;
however BSD sed (for example) supports most of them, and I can't help
but feel it'd be nice to be able to use a platform's native sed wherever
possible. The above scheme is just what seems like the obvious solution
that shouldn't affect GNU systems too much, but lets us use native apps
where possible. Where those native apps suck too much then those
profiles can just keep the gsed alias.

At the moment, this is just a random thought that occurred and got
written down, so don't be surprised if I've overlooked something.

Any comments? Suggestions, flames? (Except from ciaranm, of course...)


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