Re: portability as a goal for debian?
Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>:
> Since bash can do a lot more than the subset, it would be dumb not
> to take advantage of the features when they would be useful.
Hear hear!
Portability is good, but it's not good enough to override all other
factors. Writing a truly portable Makefile, for example, requires one to
either limit oneself to very simple things, or to do pre-processing and
other quite complicated things. By abandoning portability and requring
GNU Make, one can often do the complicated things in a simple way. The
cost? Whoever needs to port the program needs to use GNU Make (which
itself is quite portable) instead of the native one.
Similarly, if a bash script is much simpler than a more portable sh
script, and the target platform (Debian) is guaranteed to have bash,
why not use it?
I do not buy that porting Debian to work on top of (parts of) OpenBSD
userspace is a good thing. OpenBSD itself works quite well enough, and
porting Debian on top of it doesn't seem to buy much, and definitely
not at the cost of complexity, loss of functionality and extra work it
would require from those accustomed to working on top of the GNU tools.
--
Lars Wirzenius <liw@wapit.com>
Architect, Kannel WAP and SMS Gateway project, Wapit Ltd, http://www.kannel.org
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