Jason King wrote: > As I think has been mentioned before, I seriously doubt if you talk to > most any UNIX user they are one bit about GNU grep vs Solaris grep vs > BSD grep (or gnu tar vs solaris tar vs bsd tar vs star). What they > care about is 'grep -r works' 'tar -xvzf works' etc.
Exactly. The functionality is what is important to end-users, not the implementation, as long as the implementation doesn't cause problems. Unfortunately, the current implementation *does* cause problems, especially for users who are trying to learn/use Solaris and OpenSolaris at the same time. If a GNU utility is a proper superset of the Solaris version, would patches to replace the Solaris version with the GNU version be accepted? Or, is there some kind of rule that says that all Solaris functionality must be present without depending on any GNU-licensed software? Would patches to the Solaris tar to add "tar zj", automatic support for *un*tarring GNU tar archives, and manual support for creating GNU tar archives be accepted? Would a patch to add "grep -r" to solaris grep be accepted? Would patches to add GNU long option names to the Solaris userland utilities be accepted? If so, then I think it would be best to find the top 5-10 most requested GNU userland features (e.g. "tar z") and implement them in the Solaris userland ASAP. This would give almost guaranteed 100% backwards compatibility with previous Solaris versions and "good enough" compatibility with Linux. I also think that the improvements to packaging substantially reduce the need for some Linux compatibility. For example, fewer people are going to be affected by the difference between Solaris make and GNU make because fewer people will have to run make to build their own packages. - Brian _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
