[rb-general] Reproducing tarballs under various toolchains

[David A. Wheeler]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 15:34:37 +0000, Daniel Shahaf <danielsh at apache.org> wrote:
> Unfortunately, the fact they use different syntaxes for identical
> functionality _is_ a problem.

I agree. There's precedent for fixing this kind of thing, of course... there just needs to be some agreement.

For example: A few years ago there was no *standard* way in POSIX to tell sed to use extended regular expressions (EREs).  Both GNU and BSDs supported it the functionality, but BSD sed used "-E" to ask for it, while GNU sed used "-r" (--regexp-extended). More recently the POSIX standard group added "-E" for this (you can blame me, I proposed it).  Now "-E" works on BSD sed and GNU sed, and the standards clearly say so, making it it trivial to do this.  (The GNU documentation also notes that -E is in the standard, so people who look things up will easily find out what the portable approach is).

--- David A. Wheeler