Re: GNU within the name
viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk said:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:41:46AM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
>> You are currently saying that the GNU in GNU/Linux is justified by the
>> glibc and not by any other GNU software, because these GNU software
>> are common on other unixes.
>>
>> Why? If you are right that others unixes uses widely GNU software,
>> maybe they should consider recognize the GNU part of the their
>> system. But that's a different story.
>>
>> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another system use
>> the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the GNU/Linux name.
>
> Why not?
You said what I expected from you: you revealed that you disbelieve
that the system should be called GNU/Linux. Good to know in this kind
of discussion.
Why not?
I will not reply to that question, I think there is enough information
on the web about that, for instance
<http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html>
>> It does not make sense: the GNU part of the name shows that the system
>> used is the system designed/initiated by the GNU project running with
>> the kernel Linux, which is not part of GNU. It does not mean that
>> there are GNU software rarely used elsewhere in the system!
>
> Debian had not been initiated by GNU project, IIRC. "Designated" is
> closer to reality, but that wouldn't warrant _anything_ - after all,
> gcc had been designated as a primary C compiler on a lot of systems,
> but that doesn't make it {lots of organizations}/gcc. It doesn't work
> in that direction - *contributor* may have a right to make demands, not
> the other way round.
>
> And yes, GNU *had* contributed stuff. The main dependency being glibc.
>
> BTW, if you are talking about frequency of use, glibc beats everything
> else by far. With X11 and assorted daemons (almost all of them coming
> not from GNU) contending for the second place - depends on the type of use.
>
> If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as replacement...
> on such system GNU claims would become much weaker. Not that there was
> a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement of glibc on Linux
> would be a lot of work and so far none of the alternative libc projects had
> tried to pull that off.
When I'm told that a system is running GNU/whatever, I expect first to
find there GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU Emacs, GNU Compiler
Collection, gzip, GNU awk,GNU make, the GNU Debugger, GNU sysutils,
GNU tar, GNUpg, GNU grep, GNU mailutils, GNU ncurses, GNU readline,
GNU shellutils, GNU wget...
These are required components of a system. The daemons you install on
that system are not basis components, as you may well not be using
them at all.
Anyway, your proposal is unrelated to the current subject: the NetBSD
port of Debian GNU. Unless you are about to propose that Debian
completely change it's naming policy, I think we can stop this
dicussion now.
--
Mathieu Roy
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