Re: portability as a goal for debian?
On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 03:40:13PM -0700, Eric Schwartz wrote:
> 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 think you're missing one of the key benefits of the GNU tools - as
well as being superior versions (in most cases) of the tools, they also
provide standardisation of tools across many different platforms.
ignore the fact that HP tar is different to Solaris tar which is
different to AIX tar - just install GNU tar in /usr/local/bin on all of
them and forget about it.
same applies for make and awk and sed and grep and all the other tools.
AFAIAC, a *nix system isn't ready for use or deployment until it has a
reasoably full suite of GNU tools installed on it.
craig
--
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
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