[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS GIS] #181: tac command missing in OSX

[Glynn Clements]

GRASS GIS wrote:

>  I wonder if some sort of
>  requirement in GRASS 7 development would be a good idea to stick to
>  POSIX/SUS commands?

Well, we normally try to follow that rule already, but we don't all
have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the standards, so the use of
non-portable features often occurs, and may go unnoticed for some
time. We don't have the resource to run extensive audits.

Also, some scripts may require utilities beyond anything which is
specified by POSIX. E.g. there isn't any POSIX-mandated equivalent of
wget or curl.

In any case, for 7.x we should be moving to Python for scripts. That
should largely eliminate the need to call external utilities. Simple
text processing, as is normally performed with cat/sort/grep/sed etc,
can be implemented in a few lines of code using only core functions. 
More complex utilities often have equivalent modules (e.g. httplib
instead of wget/curl).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>