Re: [9fans] ports from GPL

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

yes. gnu really did loose their way.

too bad. the early stuff was quite good. gnu
grep, (hi mike) for example, didn't have the limitations of
grep on sunos or xinu bsd.

now gnu grep is so broken that
	LC_LANG=utf8 grep fu j-random-file
is 80x slower than
	LC_LANG=C grep fu j-random-file

this is not entirely gnu's fault. posix confuses
locale and character set.

coreutils (which includes /bin/cp) has a 40k-line library
with over 1k preprocessor conditionals. even with that
library:

; wc -l /var/tmp/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1/src/cat.c $home/9.cd/sys/src/cmd/cat.c
  861 /var/tmp/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1/src/cat.c
   36 /home/quanstro/9.cd/sys/src/cmd/cat.c
  897 total

no wonder it's not very portable.

- erik

On Fri Mar 17 09:48:19 CST 2006, rminnich@lanl.gov wrote:
> erik quanstrom wrote:
>
> > however gnu has devolved.
>
> degenerated.
>
> It occured to me the other day that tex has way more useful things to
> say about portability than, say, gnu /bin/cp.
>
> Tex seems to run on anything that has an ALU and a program counter and
> more than 20 bits of address space.
>
> ron