I was walking trough some ebuilds and suddenly came accross one that was using sed -i to do a substitution on a file. -i option is not very portable. This is gonna create some problems with at least the upcoming macosx porting effort, since Darwin's sed doesn't support -i. Grepping trough my portage dir i found hundreds of occurences of this syntax. All these occurences ought to be replace with something like the following: sed "s:tosub:thesub:" configure.orig > configure Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
If the ebuild didn't DEPEND on >=sys-apps/sed-4 it should be reported as a bug. However, the use of sed -i will only increase in portage as I, as well as others are adding it as fast as we can because it's much better than the old cp x x.orig; sed blah x.orig > x thing. sed -i in general is not a bug so I'm closing this as WONTFIX. But as I mentioned above, please report individual ebuilds that don't DEPEND correctly.
the answer in terms of porting is 'we will patch to add support' :)
It's notable that FreeBSD added -i functionality to its sed for compatibility reasons. This means a future release of MacOS X may well import this change and support it. Flag compatibility tends to bleed across UNIX flavors. And if not, GNU sed can be installed and used.
*** Bug 24237 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
