From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 16 Nov 2003 12:32:10 MST." From: "Russ Cox" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <25135.1069019205.1@t40.swtch.com> Message-Id: Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 16:46:45 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8b80ee12-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > > Also, FreeBSD has reverted to BWK awk for /usr/bin/awk. > > The BSD's would like to be completely free of all GNU software for pretty > much the same reasons people bash it on this list. Just ask Theo :) Actually, only OpenBSD, and for completely different reasons. OpenBSD wants to be free of GNU software for purely ideological reasons. If the same software were available under the BSD license they would have no problem whatsoever keeping it around. Listen to what Theo has said here -- if 8c were available under a BSD license, he'd use it. Otherwise not. Regardless of its technical merits or not vs. gcc. 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. On this list, my impression is that people bash the GNU software because the canonical examples (gcc, configure, etc.) are overly complicated, slow, and hard to understand. These are very practical reasons. If software written like Plan 9 were available under a GPL, I would use it and happily incorporate it into the distribution if it were useful. Ideology vs. a certain kind of software quality. 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. Arguably groff is built better than troff. (I'm not as familar with gawk vs. awk so don't construe my lack of comment as anything other than ignorance.) Assuming that GNU software has uniform software quality is simply flawed. Getting back to the original topic, I think forsyth summed up well. It's not clear to me that configure buys you much more than #ifdefs nowadays, though in the days of many varied vendor systems I can believe it had more utility. I am particularly amused by the configure scripts that have begun appearing recently, which churn for a while and then say something approximating "config.sub: I've never heard of a system called `plan9' before, so I'm not continuing." Russ