On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 11:50:02AM +1100, Anand Kumria wrote:
> All these portability problems go away once everyone is using the GNU commands
Hahah.. "Standards?? We don't need no blinkin standards!"
> I mean, why should all these companies employ someone to maintain `ls' (or
> similiar) when a better, free version is already available.
Where do I start...
* Because they need to support it (try doing that without forking!)
* Because they need to stick to Standards (damn, there's that word again)
* Because, in more than a few cases, the non-GNU is better.
> 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.
Why? Useful on occasions perhaps, but "too valuable to not have" ?
Don't get me wrong, the GNU tools are great, and quite often better than
the vendor specific versions. More and more we're beginning to see vendors
ship GNU tools with their OSes (eg, Solaris now comes with bash as a standard
shell, and a number of other GNU tools as unsupported extras).
Scott.
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