Re: The GNU thing
On Wed, Mar 24, 1999 at 06:51:49AM -0600, Jonathan Guthrie wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, David B. Teague wrote:
>
> > > The importance of compilers was one reason I chose to license Linux
> > > under the GNU Public License (GPL). The GPL was the license for the
> > > GCC compiler. I think that all the other projects from the GNU group
> > > are for Linux insignificant in comparison.
>
> I think this statement is absolute truth. Linux wouldn't exist without
> GCC, but it certainly could without textutils or shellutils and suchlike.
interesting opinion. Maybe you never tried to "dpkg --purge --force-depends
--force-essential" those packages.
Sure, you may miss boring things like "cat", "echo", "date" for a few days
(after you got used to it), well, after you managed to log in your broken
system. The boot scripts won't run at all without bash and those tools...
Sure, make is irrelevant. We can use any broken make from other systems
(are there other make's?), except for some programs which require GNU make.
You won't be able to compile in a sub directory, though, using VPATH. This
may prevent compilation of quite some Debian packages. but, without the
above tools, you won't be able to compile them anyway.
Personally, I'd miss perl a lot. Too bad that its configure script checks
for "cat" and alike.
I have heard that BSD has replaced some of the tools. Maybe it would be
possible to port them to linux.
But then, some sort of textutils you need. In this regard, I find Linus'
comment utterly bullshit and closed-minded. OTOH, I would not hesitate to
call Linux insignificant, compared with the GNU projects.
Marcus
readying his flame-proof suite.
--
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