Hullo developers,
for a while now I've been wondering if all those sed scripts in all those ebuilds are really effective. To find out, I've tried a couple of angles on a sed hook that basically dissects the sed command line provided, divides everything up into sed scripts, files being processed and other options, and runs everything through diff to get some meaningful QA output as to the effective use of the sed scripts invoked. Of course some of the time a sed script falsely seems to be ineffective, but could be, when it uses some variable or output that varies depending on the platform you run it on, like with the likes of $(get_libdir). I've looked into sed's internal solutions to no avail, but something like -i[SUFFIX] might help, since it gives you a backup file to compare with the file that's being streamed. The idea is to pass the result to | diff -u $file $file[SUFFIX] to figure out what was changed, and what sed script changed it. Any help? jer PS: Because the outcome may depend on the platform you run the scripts on, this probably shouldn't make it into a QA test in portage, but it could still help developers evaluate how effective their ebuilds' and eclasses' sed scripts are.