From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Lyndon Nerenberg To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery Message-ID: <2147483647.1068997081@[192.168.42.6]> In-Reply-To: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 15:38:01 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8c46835c-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 --On Sunday, November 16, 2003 4:46 PM -0500 Russ Cox 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