From owner-freebsd-arch Tue Dec 28 13:59: 9 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.yes.no (ns1.yes.no [195.204.136.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A9C0014EE9 for ; Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:59:06 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from eivind@bitbox.follo.net) Received: from bitbox.follo.net (bitbox.follo.net [195.204.143.218]) by ns1.yes.no (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA05960 for ; Tue, 28 Dec 1999 22:57:48 +0100 (CET) Received: (from eivind@localhost) by bitbox.follo.net (8.8.8/8.8.6) id WAA74211 for freebsd-arch@freebsd.org; Tue, 28 Dec 1999 22:57:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from feral.com (feral.com [192.67.166.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 44D3415039 for ; Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:55:49 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mjacob@feral.com) Received: from beppo.feral.com (beppo [192.67.166.79]) by feral.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA05515; Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:58:02 -0800 Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:55:46 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Jacob Reply-To: mjacob@feral.com To: Bill Fumerola Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Changing diff's default output format In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 28 Dec 1999, Bill Fumerola wrote: > On Tue, 28 Dec 1999, Matthew Jacob wrote: > > > -u over -c will break the movement of diffs from *BSD to Solaris which I > > use every nigh > > t. > > Solaris's patch isn't smart enough to read those? What decade are they in? That's hardly the point. The point here, which I won't defend very vigorously, is that there are maybe 10 basic Unix utilities, that should be default look pretty much the same across *all* Unix systems. There may be some POSIX collateral on this, if not SVID stuff- I'm too far out of the standards game now to remember. But the idea here is default warm && fuzzies for things like ls, sh, cat, who, grep, tail, wc and diff. It's not like all of this cannot be worked around- it's not *that* big of a deal. But I argue that for the very few simple basic utils that keeping it standard by default is a very large plus for all Unix variants. Making it 'different' even if 'better' is the route that SCO, DG-UX, IRIX, OSF/1 all have fallen into, thus allowing Microsoft (and now Linux) to sell everyone a load of counterfeit diamonds. Things like whether there are or are not block devices, whether there are one or two filemarks at the end of a tape are very much non-issues relative to a basic look/feel. I've made my point- if people agree, great. If not, it's not that big of a deal. I was hacking on Unix before BSD let alone FreeBSD was around, and I'm sure I'll outlive FreeBSD too despite the g/better/s//different/g trap. -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message