[macports-ports] branch master updated: grep: add new variant to install as ggrep

[George Plymale II]

Christopher Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> I agree.
>
> To be honest I fail to see the rationale for making any changes here
> at all.
>
> What exactly is the reason for wanting to prevent the MP version of
> grep from hiding the system one ? What real world problem does this
> cause ?

There are certain incompatibilities between BSD grep and GNU grep. If
you compare the man pages, you'll see that GNU grep lacks certain
options provided by BSD grep (and vice versa) and that some options
behave differently. For the sake of brevity, I do not want to enumerate
all such incompatibilities here. But they do exist. I have run into
trouble before when I've relied on GNU grep instead of BSD grep for
certain scripts and so I've become wary about doing that anymore. I
really like having a distinction between the two greps which is no more
than one character. Homebrew does this by default and I had gotten used
to it, so I was hoping to have the same behavior in Macports.

> Why in this cases cannot you just directly refer to the system grep
> using /sr/bin/grep than relying on what PATH finds ?

For convenience. Typing out /usr/bin/grep a lot gets annoying after a while ;)