Hacks for AIX

I saw some earlier postings about this, so I thought I would share my solution (I'm using xlc, BTW). The following tests were broken for me (using a pull from 2 days ago).

    * t0002-gitfile.sh
    * t1002-read-tree-m-u-2way.sh
    * t2201-add-update-typechange.sh
    * t4109-apply-multifrag.sh
    * t4110-apply-scan.sh
    * t7002-grep.sh

The problems all seem to be rooted in the default utilities shipped with AIX:

    * /usr/bin/grep - behaves badly in t7002.   I believe it is test
12 and related to the -n -w -e combination of options.
    * /usr/bin/diff - has problems with -u and -U.
                         I saw the $GIT_CMP_TEST env var, but this is
not used everywhere within the test scripts above.
    * /usr/bin/patch - really old version, doesn't do well with some
diff formats.   I avoid using it.
    * /usr/bin/install - doesn't behave the expected way either.

In some cases, the tests could have been made more portable by using a plain "diff" rather than "diff -u", for example.

Fortunately, there are optional freeware versions that can be installed for all of these (along with tar and wish too). These versions if installed, are all found in /usr/linux/bin (or equivalently /opt/freeware/bin), I just wish they weren't optional. I have found that having these utilities installed and prepending /usr/linux/bin to the PATH results in a clean make test and build.

I also saw one instance where the behavior of git-grep was affected by the grep selected at build time. I'm not sure if there's other instances within the code base, but I'm wondering whether the configure script can be changed to do the check for /usr/linux/bin and use those versions? I can imagine that similar problems may occur on Solaris and HPUX.

Otherwise, I'm quite happy with git.