replication of stuff in /usr/gnu

[Joerg Schilling]

"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:

> I would expect that to be true for commands that actually have some 
> non-trivial purpose.  E.g. for GNU grep this argument holds water.  But 
> for "true" to have --version and --help?  It seems a bit of a stretch.
>
> If we expect *all* commands to support this, then we should just 
> integrate that into our own command set.  But I think that this is not a 
> realistic approach.

I did already propose this. The problem with using Sun libc::getopt() is that
it needs an asociated short option and that many commands already implement a 
-h option for a different porpose. For this reason, it is not possible to use 
the local getopt for this task. GNU getopt_long() has the wrong license and is 
full of conceptional bugs that create funny exceptions from the expected option 
parsing behavior.

.... well, there is getargs() which is under CDDL and which does not have known 
problems - except that it fully follows POSIX utility syntax guidelines and 
for this reason makes it a bit more expensive (you need a callback) to 
implement options combinations that depend on the order of the options.

> Hey, I'm all for choice, when the choice actually has some meaningful 
> value.  I just don't think this is the case here.

The problem seems to be that Sun currently undervalues the importance of 
utilities and put's more effort in kernel enhancements. In many cases, the 
Solaris versions of utilities are better than their GNU counterparts or would 
be in case someone would put little effort into this utility.

> Having multiple versions of commands, beyond the wast of disk and 
> pathnames, causes other issues:
>
> 1) increased build times.
> 2) increased variability in the environment... making debug and 
> diagnosis of bugs, and maintenance incrementally more complex
> 3) in the case of the GNU variants, I submit that the GNU variants of 
> these trivial utilities actually have a negative impact on 
> performance... the GNU utilities are clearly *larger* than the Sun 
> versions, and I can only imagine that this has an increased negative 
> impact on cache, etc.

You forgot: 

4) It makes people believe that Sun does not know what's best.
   FreeBSD would never try similar experiments but would continue to use the 
   own software whereever possible.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily