Re: Circular dependency in textutils

[Paul Eggert]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm not sure it's worth worrying about, but in case
> someone thinks it is, the place to fix it is in autoconf,
> so I'm forwarding your message to that list.

The GNU coding standards say that makefiles can assume that 'sort' works;
see <http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_52.html#SEC52>.

Coreutils has several other bootstrapping issues like this.  I agree
it's not worth worrying about.  The GCC build procedure assumes a C
compiler, and coreutils is similar.

> > My ISP is converting users to a virtual server which currently does
> > not have sort,

No "sort"?!  POSIX requires "sort", so you can wave a copy of the
POSIX standard at them (for all the good it'll do you :-).