>From Bash and readline man page (bugs section): "It's too big and too slow.
I think this bug is the perfect definition of GNU/FSF style. Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated? On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Preben Randhol <rand...@pvv.org> wrote: > On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200 > Mate Nagy <mn...@port70.net> wrote: > >> > I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, >> > glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a >> > simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL >> > license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I >> > don't like rms. >> i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU >> software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and >> usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have >> >features< (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic >> >hackjobs. >> >> Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but >> obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as >> annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even >> Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI >> userland that make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead >> of zsh as an everyday shell? >> >> At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be >> made about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's >> better than any small text editor; because text editing is one of >> those typical tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million >> features that are in no way related to each other. Even if someone >> writes a really small, elegant, suckless editor core, it will be >> unusable until: >> - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) >> - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) >> - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... >> - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) >> - autocompletion, ctags integration >> These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement >> these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. >> Sucklessness goes through the window. >> (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) >> >> I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's >> suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not >> all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only >> marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper >> handling of this would require adding of this "bloat" everyone hates >> so much. >> >> Best regards, >> Mate >> PS. am not trolling :) >> > > I couldn't agree with you more! > > > -- > Preben Randhol > http://wee-free-lore.blogspot.com/ > > >