Re: portability as a goal for debian?
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 09:15:27AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 10:40:23AM +0100, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
> > But this is just a symtom of our focus on gnu tools, without
> > beeing explicit about it. (And I do not thing that we become
> > explicitly gnu-focused. the opposit is true, we should try and
> > use the common funktionality subset)
>
> If you had a Debian system where tar, make etc were not the GNU
> versions, would it really be Debian? It certainly wouldn't be
> Debian GNU.
>
> Portability is good, but I don't see any benefit in attempting
> if you take the GNU out, it's not Debian.
>
> IMHO the whole concept of Debian/*BSD is flawed, because it's
> based on the assumption than the *BSD kernel is better than
> the Linux kernel, and I don't see any proof of that.
>
Well, not necessarilly... I mean, just because they want to use
BSD kernel doesn't mean that it's better, just that its different;
I also have some doubts about Debian/BSD but for different reasons...
The BSD have a very different approach to many things, and this is beginning
to show... I will not give up GNU toools for anything really, and one of
the reasons I use Debian it's because of it being 'closer' to GNU
than other dists. THis is only my view however, other ppl have
millions of other valid reasons for using Debian. But without GNU... Debian
would not be Debian, at least the Debian I know.
I'm just happy that the BSD's use gcc, or we probably would also be
contemplating changing compilers.
As for portability, compatibility et al I really don't see how using
GNU tools is bad, I think that all this are they main advantages...
the GNU Coding Standards (updated 2 days ago BTW) explicitly advice
developers that they should not use GNU extensions just for the fun
of it, and if they do it gives solutions to make it work with and without
them... by setting POSIXLY_CORRECT ppl can have a totally sh compat shell.
I really don't know why the hell moving from GNU and towards BSD in this
field wil - In my personal case it would be a really PITA.
Anyway, if we want to talk about portability.... then we probably should
make apt, dpkg, debconf *work* on all POSIX systems.
Compatibility to other POSIX systems is desirable but not paramoun - especially
with non-free systems; I would make an effort to make a program that I make work
under all BSD's, GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd and other free OS's; I wouldn't bother with making
it work under Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX or AIX unless I really needed to - and I wouldn't
advertise it.
Installing GNU tools is the first thing I do make make a Unix (TM) system useful
anyway; it would be very strange to have more GNU tools in a company's Sparc or ALpha
than a home in a Debian system.
Oh, and before ppl say that I have something against *BSD: I have nothing, I like the OS
and the tools; but that doesn't mean I have to use them instead of GNU equivalents just
to say that I'm a modern open-source liberal guy.
Oh well, I'll shut up now.
best regards,
fsm
--
fsmunoz@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
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