Mike Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:

> Others have pointed out that the GNU tools tend to be broken for
> various different definitions of broken. I'll add that their designs
> are also broken. They seem to suffer from creeping featurism and
> bloat. Try figuring out what it would take to turn the solaris cp into
> a superset of GNU cp, for instance. Well, some of the commands seem
> that way.  Some are fine - that there's no real consistency between
> them is another issue.

What you find in typical GNU tools is unplanned featurism. Look e.g. at GNU 
find, it supports the rather useless -mmin instead of properly extending the
-mtime features as introduced by sfind and FreeBSD find.

The main Problem with the GNU tools is the fact that for most of them, the 
maintainers did change frequently because the maintainers did no longer like
to be a target of the social problems from Stallman.

A well known problem from frequent maintainer changes is that there is no clea 
structure in the source and that there is no clear structure in the command 
syntax. People appear, add what they believe is important (without looking at 
the whole) and disappear soon later.


> I'm all for updating the Solaris command set to include features from
> newer versions of the commands on other systems; I just think it

I believe that we should carefully maintain the OpenSolaris userland and 
that it makes sense to have an own set of commands that fit to the features in 
the kernel.

Note that before adding features, the commands need to be made C-clean and to
be ported to 64 bit. Also note that Sun would need to start accepting 
contributions....

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:[email protected] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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