From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: erik quanstrom Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:17:41 -0600 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] ports from GPL MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 15f1777a-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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