I guess there are not many people who care for /bin/ed, but the manifest I maintain uses it for scripted in-place editing of the appdata.xml of the package to add the version during the beta phase. This is by far the simplest solution I could find (the entire “script” is only 7 lines in the YAML).
What may be of general interest though is my question: How is the flatpak runtime built from the freedesktop-sdk sources on gitlab? Because the gitlab repo still includes the “manifest” for GNU ed. How is it filtered out? Does it make sense to report its absence from the flatpak runtime as a bug on gitlab? Or where else can I report it? (or see the decision to remove it)
Well, it is present at least in 20.08 and 21.08. I only have these installed, so can’t check 22.08, but I didn’t notice the same problem when I tried to use that last year. (I had to revert to 21.08 because it brought out some other bug in our app, that I was only able to hunt down recently)
So to the other half of my OP: How can I know it isn’t/wasn’t supposed to be there?
(I don’t want to add it as a module, the whole point of using it was to get rid of auxiliary build-only dependencies. At worst I’ll use sed instead. )
Actually by the time I’d started using computers (well in the previous millennium), fullscreen editors were the norm, and I’ve only ever used ed in this manifest, where I added it about 19 months ago.
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