Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 10/11] package/mawk: create awk symlink on install

[Thomas Petazzoni via buildroot <buildroot@buildroot.org>]

Hello Jean-Michel,

On Fri, Apr 24, 2026 at 03:23:25PM +0200, Jean-Michel Hautbois wrote:
> Many scripts and Makefiles expect 'awk' to be available in PATH.
> When mawk is the only awk implementation installed, create a symlink
> from awk to mawk so that these scripts work without modification.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jean-Michel Hautbois <jeanmichel.hautbois@yoseli.org>

Thanks for this patch! First of all, it could really be sent
separately from this series, as it is totally independent from the
Coldfire work. This would allow us to identify it as being
independent, and merge it independently (faster!) than the rest of the
Coldfire work that is more complicated.

> +define MAWK_CREATE_SYMLINK
> +	ln -sf mawk $(TARGET_DIR)/usr/bin/awk
> +endef
> +
> +MAWK_POST_INSTALL_TARGET_HOOKS += MAWK_CREATE_SYMLINK

This is good, but you forgot to account for the case where mawk may
not be the only awk implementation selected.

So you need to add:

   $(if $(BR2_PACKAGE_MAWK),mawk) \

to BUSYBOX_DEPENDENCIES in busybox.mk (you'll see a long list of such
dependencies). This ensures that full blown implementations are
installed *before* Busybox, and then when we install Busybox, we are
careful to not overwrite the already installed tools.

Then, you also need to avoid the conflict between gawk and mawk. After
discussing with other maintainers, it seems like our preference is to
have mawk win over gawk, so you should add:

ifeq ($(BR2_PACKAGE_GAWK),y)
MAWK_DEPENDENCIES += gawk
endif

This way, we will be sure that gawk gets built before mawk, ensuring
that mawk wins.

Could you look into this?

Thanks a lot!

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