Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery

[Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>]

--On Sunday, November 16, 2003 4:46 PM -0500 Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>
wrote:

> I'm not aware that any of the other BSDs are itching to
> get rid of all their GNU software. Judging from the CVS and other
> logs, it appears that FreeBSD switched to BWK awk mainly because gawk
> had problems on the Sparc64.

FreeBSD would like to replace GPL code with BSD licensed code, *when it
it practical to do so*. The (well, a) main reason for this is to make
life easier for the embedded systems folks, who need to worry about GPL
taint requiring them make their proprietary source available. There's
much less zealotry about this in the FreeBSD camp vs. the OpenBSD
folks. The reasons for replacing awk, in no particular order, were:
size of the gawk code, license, and compatibility with traditional awk.
The mailing lists describe the reasoning better than CVS does.

> Finally (and this is more directed at Lyndon's post than yours) not
> all GNU software is crap.  Some of it is quite good, and I believe
> that gawk and groff are examples of this.

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. This results in awk
scripts that rely on gawk-specific features, and in most cases the
script author doesn't even realize this is happening. bash masquerading
as sh is another culprit here. I've spent a lot of time over the years
fixing portability bugs in software that was developed on GNUish
systems, but had to run on traditional UNIX or POSIX environments. The
only real fix for this is for the world to acknowledge that Linux just
ain't UNIX, and let's all stop pretending it is.

--lyndon