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Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:36:38 +0900
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Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > Again, the point is that to build a package, one should use only a
 > small and portable set of utilities.

"Should be portable", yes, but "should be small" is no longer obvious
for typical applications, especially on "modern" desktop platforms.
It's true for those packages needed to bootstrap a system, but after
that DRY ("don't repeat yourself") becomes more important to many,
perhaps most, developers.

It could be that the package in question qualifies as a bootstrap
package, or as a member of the small & portable set of utilities used
in building such packages.  However, in many cases what we see is
people complaining about lack of portability of a program developed in
a tool-rich environment for use in the tool-rich environment.  While I
sympathize with DJGPP developers and embedded developers who may not
work in such environments, as suggested earlier that requires a
volunteer willing to do the portability work.

 > The GNU Coding Standards require that.

More honored in the breach than the observance these days.