Re: non portable sed scripts

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Paul,

* Paul Eggert wrote on Fri, May 19, 2006 at 11:04:52PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > We check the 99 commands limit, but
> > not the [4000] characters limit any more...  :-/
> 
> But the 4000-character limit is documented by Autoconf to be a limit
> on the length of lines of sed's input data, not a limit on the total
> size of the sed script.

D'oh.  I misread this section long ago and have always thought that
wrongly since...

So then the total limit of the script size I found on Solaris (described
in that other mail in this thread that was pending for some hours)
really is a new issue.

> However, it turns out that we check the 99 commands limit incorrectly,
> as the sed script in question contains 100 commands.  I installed this
> patch.  It's conceivable that this patch fixes the problem; it'd be
> nice to test this.

All my testing of seds a couple of months ago showed that labels do not
count as commands.  If you have a sed where this is different, then I'd
like to know.

> I found what appear to be some other off-by-one issues that cause
> 98-line scripts instead of 99, but these are not bugs so I didn't fix
> it.  Also, that code is too hairy (does anybody understand it other
> than its author? I sure don't) so I didn't want to mess with it.

It's pretty hairy.  I don't want to claim that I fully understand it,
but I did fix a couple of bugs in it.

> In the long run we're probably better off finding a working 'sed' than
> continuing to cater to broken ones.

FWIW, I agree.  Actually, it would probably be best to kill the
quadratic complexity in the number of AC_SUBSTs incurred by a sed script
and replace it by an awk script that searches for @[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*@
in the .in file and uses that variable name as key in a hash.

Cheers,
Ralf