[...] > You picked a bad example. GNU tar has its own share > of problems. By > default no other achiever than GNU tar can unpack > long path names in > archives created by GNU tar. That's a big problem. It > becomes worse > because tar archives with long path names created > with GNU tar from > 2002 can't be read back by GNU tar from 2010. That's > a huge problem. > Of course it can be solved by using the old GNU tar, > star from schilly > or AT&T AST pax. But it shows how little the GNU > community invests in > stable interfaces and interoperability. I have more > examples, at least > one for each GNU tool I know.
Hmm. Some GNU tools don't stink. So far, I find gawk to be generally superior to the real thing. To my way of thinking, the problems with the GNU tools are basically: * quality varies widely from one to the next * standards compliance varies widely from one to the next * GNU tar stinks big time as an archiver/dearchiver, however handy it may be to have features like built-in (de)compression (as compared to traditional Sun tar, where you have to pipe through an appropriate decompressing program first) My impression is that a number of the AST tools have picked up the major options previously unique to the GNU tools, while trying to retain better standards compliance. Assuming that to be true, I think they'd be the way to go. Familiarity for the Linux crowd is all well and good, but shove it off in /usr/gnu (although /dev/null sounds better to me :-) Linux is _not_ a standard. That lot don't follow the "play well with other communities" rule either, because enough of them are GPL ideologues or else people that find standards to be too confining to bother complying with them. According to that undisciplined mob, you don't need well-defined driver interfaces because it's all open source. Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, open _standards_ are even more important than open code. With open standards, anyone can in principle create a compliant implementation, and more to the point, they can know that if they stick to well defined behavior, their stuff should Just Work on another compliant implementation. Open source without the discipline of open standards is, well, Linux actually... -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
