Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/pkgtools/pbulk/files/pbulk/scripts

[Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:04:59 +0100
Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> wrote:

> I consider mawk quite a bit like dash. It has a lot of small compat
> glitches all over the place and was practically dead for a long time
> too. In this specific case there is an alternative that doesn't add
> random overhead for something I think only some strange Linux
> distributions use.

If Debian can manage to use mawk to build all their packages I can't
imagine why it should not be good enough for building the same
software within pkgsrc.

I really don't see the point of making such a big fuss over a single
compatibility fix. It's not like we have to patch awk compatibility
issues often.

Furthermore the correctness of the behavior in question is not obvious.
Some discussion I found on google mentions length() on arrays was
implemented in GNU awk as recently as 2005.

-Tobias