[indiana-discuss] [osol-discuss] why gnu chmod in os2008.11?

[Casper.Dik at Sun.COM]

>If a GNU utility is a proper superset of the Solaris version, would patches
>to replace the Solaris version with the GNU version be accepted? Or, is
>there some kind of rule that says that all Solaris functionality must be
>present without depending on any GNU-licensed software?

But that's an hypothetical question (it's not the case)

>Would patches to the Solaris tar to add "tar zj", automatic support for
>*un*tarring GNU tar archives, and manual support for creating GNU tar
>archives be accepted? Would a patch to add "grep -r" to solaris grep be
>accepted? Would patches to add GNU long option names to the Solaris userland
>utilities be accepted? 

Yes, we'd like that.  "grep -r", yes, "z to tar" yes; long options; I 
don't know.

For some time I had "gtar" as my tar but it was broken too often (it 
doesn't properly unpack certain archives I encountered)

>If so, then I think it would be best to find the top 5-10 most requested GNU
>userland features (e.g. "tar z") and implement them in the Solaris userland
>ASAP. This would give almost guaranteed 100% backwards compatibility with
>previous Solaris versions and "good enough" compatibility with Linux. 

That would be nice.

Casper