Re: portability as a goal for debian?

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@mit.edu>]

>>>>> "Adrian" == Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> writes:

    Adrian> On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
    >> While working on the OpenBSD port of debian I notice several
    >> spots in the debian package infrastructure which are not
    >> portable accross unices. These are mostly gnuisms of make, but
    >> also in the gnu file utilitys. Other problems arise when in the
    >> packages ...

    Adrian> Please don't try to let the OpenBSD port of Debian work
    Adrian> without the GNU tools. The GNU tools are portable and I
    Adrian> don't expect many problems getting them running on
    Adrian> OpenBSD. And is there a good reason not to use e.g.  GNU
    Adrian> make?

I don't think the build-depends are such an interesting issue.  GNU
Make is fairly reasonable to substitute.

It's annoying though to see people save a few keystrokes on calls to
find and tar so they can avoid specifying -print or use -j or -z.  I
certainly think that people should be encouraged to submit patches
that decrease dependence on GNU tools where there is not a good reason for that dependence.  

I also think that if we run into maintainers who do not accept these
patches or disagreements about where such dependence is appropriate,
discussing changes to policy would be a reasonable solution.

One reason you might want to use native rather than GNU tools is that
the native tools deal better with local extensions (say some ACL
mechanism, security labeling, or something like that) or because they
have interesting code quality/auditing properties.

I don't see this applying to make  or most other build tools.