Re: Bug#126434: ITP: super-sed -- An enhanced version of sed

[Ganesan R <rganesan@myrealbox.com>]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to mailing-list.debian-devel as well.

>>>>> "rganesan" == rganesan  <rganesan@debian.org> writes:

> Package: wnpp 
> Version: N/A 
> Severity: wishlist    

> ssed is a version of sed that supports a few new features, including Perl
> regular expressions and much greater speed than GNU sed. A few experimental 
> features were mutuated from Perl, including in-place editing (the `i' flag)
> and the ability to pipe a command in the Bourne shell was added.

> http://spazioweb.inwind.it/seders/ssed/
> http://www.gnu.org/directory/super-sed.html

> Super sed is derived from GNU sed 3.02 and is licensed under GPL. However it
> is not a GNU project package.

I started packaging it and ran into a couple of problems

1. The source tarball is still called sed (the latest version is
   sed-3.52.tar.gz). What are my options of dealing with this other than
   asking upstream to change the source tarball?
2. I compiled with a program prefix of 's', so super sed binary will be
   called ssed to differentiate it from GNU sed. I'll also use alternatives
   to make this the default sed. This takes care of the binary and the man
   page, however the info pages are still called sed.info, sed.info-1 :-(.

GNU sed was last released in August 1998 and for all practical purposes this
is the only maintained version of sed. I have no idea why super sed changes
are not merged into GNU sed, I am waiting to hear from the author on this.

Ganesan