On 6/10/2010 1:52 PM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
I want stability and
perfect reliability in the
interface. It must do what it did yesterday and
tomorrow when dealing with
scripts and function calls for code written in 1993
if needed.
That's fine, to a point. I'm all for getting the interface right and then
not changing it. But if there are errors in the interface, or if the
interface is specified by an external body (e.g., ISO/ANSI for C and C++,
Open Group etc. for SUS) then some change is needed if you don't want to
be stuck in the past.
Nothing wrong with being stuck in the past if the "past" works just fine.
A good algorithm is tough to beat quite frankly but if you have a better
quick sort by all means let us know. To me awk is a basic tool that should
just work. I could care less about a 5% shift in speed with awk.
Everyone who manages a heterogeneous environment is for
Standards-compliance. Speed is partially an issue of featureset, since
it's hard to expect a program which provides a wider variety of features
to be *faster* than one which doesn't (the hope is that it's not toooo
much slower).
Frankly, the major problem with GNU tools that I have is that while
there are actually lots of nicer features in them that aren't available
(or only available via different binaries [e.g. grep vs egrep]) in
traditional Solaris binaries, they seem to come down on the side of
Features vs Standards - that is, they'd rather be Feature-full than
Standards-compliant.
Having the GNU toolsets around on Solaris is critical, since there's
just a huge amount of stuff written on GNU-only systems, where the
author wasn't aware (or blissfully ignored) of the difference between
the GNU tool and the XPG4 one, and wrote a GNU-specific script. I need
to run those, too.
On the other hand, I'd actually like to see us use the XPG4 (or
whichever later standard) as the DEFAULT tree, not GNU or the older
(slightly quirky) Sun ones. Sort of as a nudge to pushing people to be
standards-aware. Sadly, we still need to make sure all versions are
available, as we're going to be stuck with old stuff for quite some time
now. Maybe by 2020 we can phase out the old Sun utils and just provide
the XPG4 ones...
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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