On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 11:55:34AM +1100, Russell Davies wrote:
> ; The moment you find this to be the case, is the moment you should go out
> ; and compile the GNU toolchain for your platform.
>
> I don't like this argument. This often isn't an option.
Or get the binary packages. Sheesh, did I really have to spell this out?
> ; All these portability problems go away once everyone is using the GNU command
> s.
>
> IMO, it's better (and less effort) to adopt an approach that works
> everywhere, then you'll never be nastily surprised. You can't install
> fileutils on every unix box in the world (a lot which aren't running
> Linux).
Of course you can, if it is your box you put on what you think makes it
useful. Hundres of thousands of boxes have Perl on them. Which OSes
come with Perl as standard? Solaris does *now* (v8), others are following
as well. But they didn't used to.
> ; I mean, why should all these companies employ someone to maintain `ls' (or
> ; similiar) when a better, free version is already available.
>
> ; There are quite a few useful things that `traditional' programs don't do.
>
> yes, and you can usually combine them to _make_ them do it.
Usually, not always. Is it worth my time to write a progam in perl to
do a task (when perl isn't supplied on most OSes either) or to simply
recompile GNU find. The latter in my case.
> ; I'm not arguing that every program needs to be updated all the time (look
> ; at patch/diff, very few updates) but GNU find is too valuable to not have
> ; on every machine.
>
> I disagree. I've never been in a situation with respect to (find-ish
> tasks) that I couldn't overcome by using the standard 7th Edition
> toolkit.
Permission checking is what drove me to use GNU find over Sun's.
> Too bad if you're using Solaris or AIX or BSD or ...
Their are archives of binaries if you don't have available a compiler.
For BSD; use Open/Free/NetBSD. For Solaris check http://www.sunfreeware.com/
I'm sure a similiar service exists for AIX users as well.
Anand
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