Re: Bug#139945: ITP: prokyon3 -- a multithreaded MP3 manager and tag editor for Linux.
On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 10:22:30AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> changed). And the same Hurd developers who you belittle have written code
> that has been reused and reintegrated into the GNU system and is now used by
> you and other people in the context of the GNU/Linux system. One prominent
> example is the GNU C library itself (with for example argp which was
> initially written by Miles for the Hurd servers).
Mmmh. People might just not been aware of that. For example, GNU inetutils
was forked from the BSD port of these programs for the Hurd, but instead
making another system specific inet utils package Miles decided to make a
portable one, that runs on BSD, GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, Cygwin32, Solaris, QNX
and I don't know what else.
Another, much smaller example, is a portable implementation of kill, which I
wrote for the GNU shellutils package because some things need a standalone
kill and there wasn't one. Instead, there was a BSD kill in BSD, and a Linux
kill in the Linux procps package (I think there is also another Linux kill
in the util-linux package).
These are just two more example. We actively encourage code reuse, and usually
reject additions to the Hurd that are better done portably in some other or
seperate GNU package. And we go out and look what code and interfaces exist
we can build on (for example, for the console server we are likely going to
reuse the format of the X configuration files resp to keymaps and fonts).
(Of course for purely selfish reasons, as we would like to get everyone to
debug and improve our code instead of the code from other people :)
As you said, rewriting and changing things, and experimenting is one virtue
of free software. But just as well is another virtue, and that is sharing
and reusing code. Clean interfaces and seperation allow the one without
neglecting the other.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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