Re: [bug-gettext] failure in building po/Makefile due to crippled sed

[Bruno Haible]

Perry Hutchison wrote:
> > Can you tell us, please, which system this is? I'd like to estimate
> > the urgency/necessity of providing a workaround.
> 
> It is a Lenovo N21 Chromebook*, running Chrome OS 71.0.3578.127, in
> developer mode**.  "sed --version" reports:
> 
>   sed (GNU sed) 4.4
>   Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>   License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
> <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
>   This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
>   There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
> 
>   ...
> 
> *  Yes, I am aware of Chromebrew; I am using it as a starting point
>    but trying to bootstrap as much as possible from source rather than
>    installing from binary packages (long story).
> 
> ** Chrome OS provides no shell access at all, nor ability to run any
>    binaries other than its own, unless in developer mode; presumably
>    none of its own scripts need a fully functional sed.

Thanks for the details. To me, it looks like

  1) There are few people in the same situation as you - because when someone
     buys ChromeOS, they usually know that it is a crippled operating system.

  2) Chromebrew indeed has binaries of 'sed' that should be able to get you
     past this point.
     https://dl.bintray.com/chromebrew/chromebrew/ ->
     sed-4.7-chromeos-armv7l.tar.xz
     sed-4.7-chromeos-i686.tar.xz
     sed-4.7-chromeos-x86_64.tar.xz

This is one more instance of the old pattern "the vendor provided a deficient
system; let's use the GNU tools to make a reasonable system out of it". Like
on old Unix systems, where there was no 'cc', thus people had to install
gcc. Or the systems (like HP-UX) where 'make' is deficient and you have to
install GNU make instead. Or Windows, where Cygwin is the decent subsystem,
and so on.

There is no reason to make gettext's Makefiles more complex, when you can
follow the traditional pattern and install a working 'sed' binary on your
system.

Bruno