Re: sh -> pl

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.
>

I thought you might be thinking of that. In fact, you are completely
mischaracterising this script, which is not any part of the build
system. It is a maintenance tool, probably of practical interest to
about three people, and there is no requirement for it to be cross-platform.

>> Is perl currently required to build from tarball? If not, you would
>> be placing an additional build requirement and there may still be a
>> few odd build environments that don't sport perl by default.
>>
>
> This is 2008, and it's silly to pretend we need to support this
> "requirement" on systems where people are building Postgres.
>
>
>

Weren't you the person who just wanted not to be painted into a corner?
In general, I am in favor of having as few build dependencies as
possible. So should you be.

cheers

andrew