On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 06:17:41PM +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de> wrote:
>
> > Let me add two comments about this specific feature. The first is that
> > it is very handy for patching third party source code, since it saves
> > the hassle of reverting to ed or having to copy the files first.
>
> In the ports tree we just use perl -i.

There are also ports which use sed and dump the output and copy it back
to the original file. It would be nice to add ${REINPLACE_CMD} and
standardize on that like FreeBSD has done. They set it to sed -i as
they do not have perl in their base system. I believe extending sed
rather than depending on a programming language which lives in the gnu/
part of the tree is the lesser evil. We already have calls to perl in
enough weird places (like sparc Makefiles) and it would be nice to
reduce the number of those in order to make it easier to build embedded
yet mostly functional systems that don't need 46MB of crap in
/usr/libdata/perl5. I think compartmentalizing perl invocations into
variables so that people may provide alternative backends is the best
way to go even if sed -i does get refused (but I would certainly like to
see it make its way into the tree).