Another excerpt from the Siracusa's OS X review:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/macosx-10.2/macosx-10.2-4.html

.....................................

The Unix side of OS X has been expanded and improved considerably in 
Jaguar. In addition to the new gcc3 toolchain, previously available 
technologies have been fleshed out and new features have been added. There 
is now a more extensive set of command line tools for dealing with SMB 
(Windows) file servers. IPv6 and IPSec support have been added to the 
kernel. The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is now included, opening up 
a new world of printer drivers to Mac users--provided they're willing to 
brave the configuration process. Not all of these Unix infrastructure 
improvements have friendly GUI front-ends in Jaguar, but even those that 
don't are still hard at work behind the scenes.

There have been so many far-reaching improvements to the Unix foundation in 
Jaguar that it is difficult to complain about any small omissions. On the 
other hand, the fact that the rest of the Unix layer was so comprehensively 
updated makes the few stagnant areas all the more glaring. My personal 
peeve is that Jaguar ships with the same version of Perl (5.6.0) that came 
with 10.0. Perl 5.6.0 was released in March of 2000--over two years ago. 
Perl 5.6.1 was released in April of 2001. Perl 5.8.0 was released in July 
of 2002.

(...)

Upgrading Perl to 5.8.0 and recompiling all my old Unix software and 
libraries (apache, mod_ssl, Berkeley db, mysql, expat, etc.) gave Jaguar a 
chance to shine. Or perhaps it gave the Unix community a chance to shine. 
As with Linux in its early days, Mac OS X started life as the ugly duckling 
of the Unix world. Unix software that compiled just fine on the various 
BSDs, Solaris, Linux, and even AIX had to be manually tweaked to build on 
OS X. As time has passed, the Unix developer community has added Mac OS X 
support to their build scripts and configuration systems. The result is a 
much less painful build process for popular Unix software, almost all of 
which correctly detects and accounts for the fact that it is being built on 
Mac OS X.

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---> jab | commie | http://commie.oy.com

      "Telephone, n. An invention of the devil
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