Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:55:46 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> To: Bill Fumerola <billf@chc-chimes.com> Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Changing diff's default output format Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9912281347080.1577-100000@beppo.feral.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9912281644460.50068-100000@jade.chc-chimes.com>
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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
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