Re: portability as a goal for debian?
hamish@debian.org (Hamish Moffatt) writes:
> OK. But perhaps gcc isn't a good example; personally I couldn't even
> name any of the gcc extensions. On the other hand, the improvements
> in tar and make are much more obvious (to me, anyway).
Fair enough, although I think the same argument applies-- if you use more
widely-used idioms (standard, where they exist; I don't know if make has
a standard), then more people are likely to be able to read and
understand them. I know it's possible to type 'tar -xvzf' on a Linux
box, but I spend enough time on HP-UX that my fingermacros now say
'gzip -dc <file> | tar -xvf -' which also has the advantage of being
compression-independent (bzip2 is just as easy to type), portable. and
resistant to change of tar flags :).
I realize this is Debian *GNU*/Linux. And that GNU tools themselves are
very portable. All I'm saying is that encouraging portability not only
makes for more portable software (a worthy goal, generally), it makes for
software that's easier to read and modify, and isn't that what free
software's all about?
-=Eric
--
It's a short step from using alt.binaries.warez.protocol-droids.c3p0 to
Palpatine seeing a post along the lines of: "CA|\| NE1 0N Th]5 BB0ARD T3Ll M3
H0w 2 GeT KeWL S]Th P0WeRZ!?!?!?!??!?" The rest is, well, a couple
more overly-hyped ILM graphics demos. -- henke@kharendaen.krall.org in ASR
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