Hello Thomas,

El mié, 27 abr 2022 a las 0:02, Thomas Petazzoni (<thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>) escribió:
Hello,

On Tue, 26 Apr 2022 20:16:12 +0300
Baruch Siach via buildroot <buildroot@buildroot.org> wrote:

> Hi José,
>
> On Tue, Apr 26 2022, José Luis Salvador Rufo wrote:
> > Patch title: docs/manual/prerequisite.txt: add diffutils 
>
> No need for this line in the commit log body. The email subject line
> appears as head line of the git commit once applied.

Yep.

> > The command `cmp` is used by `package/pkg-generic.mk` at commit
> > 8623cc5deb5. This command is provided by `diffutils`. 
>
> Actually, we have host-diffutils, so we can build cmp if the host does
> not have it installed. All we need is support added under
> support/dependencies/ like a few other utilities.

Yes, but we're not going to build host-diffutils if cmp is missing.
It's not done in our current implementation, and I don't think we want
to do that. So it seems like diffutils is indeed a hard requirement.

> We also don't list findutils as prerequisite, even though we rely
> heavily on the 'find' utility.

So perhaps we should list findutils as well in our hard requirements?
 
Seems fair, IMHO.
 

José Luis: practically speaking, with which distribution have you been
able to get a system without diffutils/findutils installed by default?
 
Docker official Archlinux image. On other hand `findutils` is installed by default in this image.

```shell
❯ docker pull archlinux:latest
latest: Pulling from library/archlinux
b65db44913f6: Pull complete
beb98d5a80d3: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:a9a59155d8cfd44d01432a1ef011dc015ff96e970adf787b632229fd637ea98c
Status: Downloaded newer image for archlinux:latest
docker.io/library/archlinux:latest

❯ docker run -it --rm archlinux:latest
[root@354a655ce3f9 /]# pacman -Qi diffutils
warning: database file for 'core' does not exist (use '-Sy' to download)
warning: database file for 'extra' does not exist (use '-Sy' to download)
warning: database file for 'community' does not exist (use '-Sy' to download)
error: package 'diffutils' was not found
[root@354a655ce3f9 /]# pacman -Qi findutils
warning: database file for 'core' does not exist (use '-Sy' to download)
warning: database file for 'extra' does not exist (use '-Sy' to download)
warning: database file for 'community' does not exist (use '-Sy' to download)
Name            : findutils
Version         : 4.9.0-1
Description     : GNU utilities to locate files
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/
Licenses        : GPL3
Groups          : base-devel
Provides        : None
Depends On      : glibc  sh
Optional Deps   : None
Required By     : base  ca-certificates-utils
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 1416.31 KiB
Packager        : Tobias Powalowski <tpowa@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Wed 02 Feb 2022 05:55:26 AM UTC
Install Date    : Sun 24 Apr 2022 12:04:13 AM UTC
Install Reason  : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature
```

Thanks,

Thomas
--
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com