On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 12:00 -0500, Derek E. Lewis wrote: > > > The problem is the freeware -- not Solaris. > > > > Heh... I'd say we have a better chance to change Solaris than to > > change the rest of the world. > > Agreed, but that alone does not make it an ideal solution.
Yeah, I agree too (; > > > All freeware that uses the > > > GNU utils should prepend a 'g' to them (ex. 'ggrep, gsed, etc.'). > > > Solaris follows this naming convention for the most part; however, the > > > vast majority of freware assumes your userland is ripe with GNU utils. > > > > In general, I don't think it's a good idea to have 2 versions of > > every utility in Solaris. Why not have just one version that works? > > In some cases the tools are not even incompatible, but the Solaris > > tool one has only a subset of the features of the GNU tool. > > Solaris prides itself on maintaining compliance with a variety of > standards. Its the developers of those OSS projects that decided to use > GNU extensions. And now, Solaris is a target, because it chose to > comply with accepted standards? In fairness, if Solaris or any other flavour of Unix was open source[1] when the FSF started, they probably wouldn't have reimplemented all the Unix commands. But once they did, they added some new features which people on the GNU side of the fence liked and started to take for granted. I wouldn't blame them for that. Of course, they could have discussed with all the Unix vendors first and could have tried to negotiate a Standard solution and users would still be waiting for those features. > > > Rather than committing such fixes to Solaris, users building such > > > freeware should send patches to the maintainers of that particular > > > project. > > > > We've been doing that in the GNOME project but it's an uphill battle > > and /me thinks it's a complete waste of resources. > > I can sympathize. I've had similar troubles with the MPlayer project, > as the Solaris/AIX port maintainer. However, I'd rather go to the > trouble of doing it the *right way*, and leaving the OSS developers to > drown in the mess they've created. The thing is, people like those messy open source programs. We can let them drown in their mess, but I'd prefer to run those programs on Solaris and not having to log into a Linux box. Sure. we need to educate maintainers about portability issues but can't really expect them to keep in mind which command line options of a tool are implemented in all flavours of Unix and which bugs are fixed or left in the product for backward compatibility[2] Laca [1] ... and available under a "free enough" license ... [2] e.g. sed and the \n at the end of the file _______________________________________________ tools-discuss mailing list tools-discuss@opensolaris.org
