On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 5:14 AM, Jeremy Henty <[email protected]> wrote: > I understand the desire for more control but I am surprised that it > led you to rewrite parts of GNU coreutils. What was your reason for > doing that?
Probably for some of the same reasons Busybox, Toybox and sbase were developed. I like Busybox and I use that with Debian on one machine. However, I prefer what sbase ( http://core.suckless.org/sbase ) has done with separate utilities rather than everything in one large file with link to utility names. There was a very interesting thread on one of the suckless.org mailing lists as to why they decided to create sbase. I liked a lot of the ideas they discussed. sbase is very nice, but not as portable as I would like. The developer of musl has also written alternatives to some of the common GNU core utilities. I do like a lot of the BSD and Minix versions of utilities. They have more lenient licenses for distributing and they're less bloated than the GNU coreutils. I currently use BSD variants of patch and gzip on all my systems. GNU coreutils have been ported to a wide variety of platforms, but they don't port well to non-POSIX platforms. I've heard some FreeDOS developers complain about the issue and the lack of support for non-POSIX systems. I'd like to use the same tools on all my systems and I'd prefer having something that worked well on older, low resource machines or embedded systems. There are quite a lot of implementations of the various core utilities out there. It's been interesting looking at the design concepts and figuring out which I like and which I'd prefer not to use. I have a growing list of core utility alternatives from various Open Source projects at the following link if anyone wants to check out some of the alternative implementations out there. http://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/3000.html The Arch Linux wiki also has some interesting entries on substituting various projects for GNU core utilities. Doesn't look like it's currently up at the Arch Linux wiki, but running a search, some old copies turn up at: https://github.com/tsgates/arch-wiki-markdown/blob/master/wiki/Base2busybox.md https://github.com/tsgates/arch-wiki-markdown/blob/master/wiki/Base2heirloom.md https://github.com/tsgates/arch-wiki-markdown/blob/master/wiki/Base2plan9.md Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
