Re: [HACKERS] sh -> pl

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> David Fetter wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:19:59AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>
>>> David Fetter wrote:
>>>
>>>> Folks,
>>>>
>>>> I've noticed that a big hunk of our build system has gratuitous
>>>> dependencies on some variety of shell and on tools like sed, none
>>>> of which makes Windows developers feel welcome. I know people are
>>>> working toward a cmake or other more cross-platform toolchain. My
>>>> proposal is a lot more modest, and doesn't conflict with the larger
>>>> one. I'd like to move the above stuff to self-contained perl would
>>>> help to make things more cross-platform and clean up, no offense to
>>>> the fine authors, some pretty crufty code in there.
>>>>
>>> Give us some examples.
>>>
>> That new version stamper calls out to sed, when perl is perfectly
>> capable of doing the same work itself and not spawning 30 shells in
>> the process.
>>
>
> This does remind me of the "Useless Use of Cat Award" from
> comp.unix.shell:
>
>

http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html
>

Well, yes. I was confused before. I thought David was referring to the
new add_cvs_markers script (which BTW does not spawn any useless shells
at all).

This script (version_stamp.pl) is already perl, and so David's criticism
of it is slightly justified, although it spawns sh and sed 5 times, not
30. It is at best a very minor inefficiency - something that mildly
annoys those of us well at home in perl and is blithely and not
unreasonably ignored by everyone else.

Note also that this script is not part of the build process either, so
the Windows developer argument hardly holds here.

cheers

andrew

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