From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
Message-Id: <200311181254.hAICsfAX010621@skeeve.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery
In-Reply-To: <2147483647.1068997081@[192.168.42.6]>
References: <E1ALUjM-0006XR-Ba@t40.swtch.com>
Cc:
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 14:54:41 +0200
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8e771ed4-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

In article <2147483647.1068997081@[192.168.42.6]> you write:
>I wasn't (necessarily) implying that. My biggest concern with GNU code
>(and this is not a GPL issue) is the massive feature-itis in the
>traditional UNIX tools. It's fine for GNU tools to grow new features if
>that's what they want, but when those tools are shipped as replacements
>for the traditional UNIX ones, we start seeing lots of portability
>problems. gawk is one example of this. When it's installed and invoked
>as awk it doesn't disable the GNU extensions.

It's against the GNU Coding Standards to have a program's behavior
depend on its name, and this makes some sense.  One easy solution
is to have /bin/awk be:

	#! /bin/sh

	exec gawk --posix "$@"

And maybe BSD and Linux distributions should do just that.
Alternatively, you can put

	export POSIXLY_CORRECT=1

into /etc/profile. (This latter is rather draconian, but it would work.)

I'll agree that GNUware is too featureful.  This includes gawk, which
has suffered much from my then-youthful enthusiasm.  I currently try to
avoid feature creeep, but old habits die hard.  Naetheless, there are
lots of things people ask for that I say "no" to.  So I'm learning,
albeit slowly.  (A decent extension mechanism and standardize API
into the interpreter's internals would move the problem out of the core
code. Not enough time...)

Featuritis isn't unique to the GNU world though.  Anybody looked at
ksh93 recently?  Who needs awk or perl or sed anymore?

Arnold