One point to note ... >>Some of it is actually a bit silly. Things like "od" (Octal >>Dump) are closed source because they contain source code >>derived from Microsoft's Xenix! Now how much effort does it >>take to rewrite od ? Probably the community can help out >>with this. >> >> > >Why not rm -rf xenix_od ? The GNU od is pretty good. This used >to be a portion of textutils before. Presently, textutils, >fileutils and shellutils have been clubbed together under a >single package 'coreutils'. It may not be 'od' per se which is >the issue, but the other stuff of coreutils are used by >virtually every script. Just accepting GNU coreutils would get >rid of any xenix related problems for a lot of crucial stuff. > > It is easy to replace OpenSolaris userland utilities with GNU coreutils/binutils however we need to consider the implications. One of the driving principiles of Solaris and now OpenSolaris has been strict compliance to standards like, SVR4, SVID (System V Interface Definition), POSIX, SUSv3 (Single Unix Specification). Unfortunately GNU utilities do not always adhere to these standards and are not fully compatible with their UNIX counterparts.
One of the aims of BeleniX is to retain as much compatibility with Solaris as possible while still coming up with new innovations. This is quite possible. However simply replacing OpenSolaris utilities with GNU stuff will break binary compatibility with Solaris. There was a long discussion on the OpenSolaris discussion list about the various distros and the need to have binary compatibility between them. When Linux started evolving such standards did not exist for Linux and the existing UNIX standards were not fully followed which led to the proliferation of incompatible Linux distros. The Linux Standard Base is a recent effort in the right direction but few distros comply to it as yet. Since OpenSolaris already has a well defined Filesystem Hierarchy and well defined Interface Specifications lets not break things. It is entirely acceptable to enhance utilities with non-standard extensions - Solaris does so and hey it is your value proposition that sets you apart. But breaking compliance with the base standard is not the right direction to go. Having said all this I really like the enhancements in GNU utilities, the long options and the extensive built-in help. For many cases the manpage is not required at all. So that is where the OpenSolaris utilites can be enhanced. And for the closed source stuff they are few and most can be easily implemented while adhering to the specifications in the manpage. These are: kill, alias, bg, cd, od, pax, read, sed, tail, test, type, ulimit, wait, tr, unalias, umask, printf, jobs Regards, Moinak.
