• Alexander Strasser's avatar
    configure: print_in_columns: Replace pr with awk · 99147312
    Alexander Strasser authored
    Get rid of pr dependency and write the columns strictly
    alphabetical without page size considerations (POSIX
    specifies 66 lines as default).
    
    Setting the page size via pr's -l option was considered,
    but as there is issue #5680 which wants to avoid pr
    mainly because it's not in busybox, we chose to replace
    pr instead.
    
    Before pr would attempt to write pages, thus if a page
    boundary was reached, the output looked confusing as one
    couldn't see there was a new page and the alphabetical
    order was disrupted when scanning down one of the columns.
    
    This change is based on a shell implementation submitted
    before by Yejun.
    
    Possible differences to the current version using pr:
    1. pr implementations should truncate items to not overflow columns;
       depending on how it's done not truncating shall be better IMHO.
    2. pr implementations might balance columns differently;
       we use minimum number of lines and might end up not
       using all columns or might have lesser entries in the
       last column(s)
    3. we use spaces only for padding the columns; at least the GNU pr
       version on my system also by default stuffs in tabs in addition
       to a single space in between columns. I don't see that this
       behaviour is demanded by POSIX, though I might be very well
       overlooking things. Anyway for our use case I can't see a need
       for having the additional tabs, or why it would be better compared
       to padding with spaces only.
    
    Fixes output for sizes with width < column width, too.
    
    Fixes remaining part of ticket #5680
    
    Contributor: Guo, Yejun <yejun.guo@intel.com>
    99147312
configure 245 KB