*PLEASE* edit the subject when you drift to another topic. Yes, portability is NOT the original topic of this thread; checksum verification on BSD systems is the original topic which is quite a bit narrower in scope. On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 6:54 AM, Antonio Huete Jimenez <ahuete.devel@gmail.com> wrote:

2008/6/2 Allan McRae <mcrae_allan@hotmail.com>:

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Antonio Huete Jimenez wrote:

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And there comes the idea I was talking about. I think that scripts should behave according to the operating from where they are running on. I'm doing some changes to scripts for doing so, but it will take me few days to have something useable. I also think that every portable code should be welcome whenever it doesn't break anything in ArchLinux and made scripts runnable on other OSes.

What do you guys think?

Using openssl for this is optimal because it works the same on all systems. Having code which detects operating system and uses specific software in each case is ugly and should be avoided if at all possible.

And how do you plan to do OS specific checks and/or configurations for portability?

The whole point is avoiding situations when we do need OS-specific checks and configurations. Take a look at the pacman and libalpm code- you will notice no checks for definitions of things like LINUX, BSD, DARWIN, CYGWIN (well one of these, but its documented and explained), etc. Portability means "runs everywhere", not "has a case in a switch statement for each platform". -Dan