On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:03:12 +0100
Mika Borner <[email protected]> wrote:
> We should not forget that Apple welcomes users with a BSD userland. Many
> developers also use Mac OS X as their preferred platform. And almost
> everybody seems quite happy with it...
This isn't quite true. Yes, OSX is fundamentally a BSD ("best of the
BSDs" would be more accurate, as they picked tools from them all)
userland, but they've been actively dropping in GNU tools where they
believed it wouldn't hurt anything, specifically to help Linux people
switch. I.e. - /bin/sh is now bash, /usr/bin/tar is the gnu tar, and
probably others, as I don't make a habit of keeping track of it.
Further, the BSD folks have been adding select features from the GNU
tools all along - so even if /usr/bin/tar on OSX were still the bsd
tar, it would understand the z and j flags (for that matter, on my OSX
dev boxes, "tar" is /usr/pkg/bin/tar, which is the NetBSD tar, which
understands the z & j flags....).
Come to think of it, being in all the BSD's as well as GNU makes a
good starting criterion for whether something should be added to the
Solaris version. Three groups of unix systems developers - other than
the original implementers - have decided this was a worthwhile
feature, and added it. Assuming they do it the same way, it's now
pretty much standard across at least the open source Unix community.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <[email protected]> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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