Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 19:53:45 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: imp@village.org (Warner Losh) Cc: chris@calldei.com, obrien@freebsd.org, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: GNU crap, in general (was stpcpy()) Message-ID: <199911011953.MAA29725@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199910291829.MAA89401@harmony.village.org> from "Warner Losh" at Oct 29, 99 12:29:38 pm
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> In message <19991029132257.A535@holly.calldei.com> Chris Costello writes: > : I'm seeing more and more of a need for a compat library for > : Linux and GNU software in general. Adding unnecessary bloat to > : our libc isn't necessary, in my opinion. > > The problem with this is that it becomes harder to build on FreeBSD > because you have to add additional, non-standard libraries to the > build process. This is the fault of the author of the tool, since > they used non-standard interfaces, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad. > The risk we run in not supporting them in libc is the perception that > FreeBSD isn't compatible (never mind what the sstandards say). > > We have similar issues with the long getopt stuff. I think it is a mistake to bring stuff that is not defined by standards into the nominally standards compliant parts of the source tree. This goes double for GNU "getopt", and other stuff that would take a serious reverse engineering effort to prove clean-room, without risking Stallman going off on a crusade, like his current crusade against the University of Michigan LDAP code's license, Mark Smith, and Tim Howes. There was a recent article in "BoardWatch" magazine that mentioned FreeBSD and Linux in the same breath as Solais and UnixWare, et. al., as what an ISP should be running on. One lament of the author was that the excellent FreeBSD ports system didn't work on platforms other than FreeBSD. While we can agree that this is a somewhat naieve comment for the author to have made, it is _very_ clear that the reason for this is, in many cases, use of GNU configure by the authors of the software making it nearly impossible to fully encapsulate the build process for multiple ports in a platform independant way... as opposed to the IMake method employed by most good X11 software, which allows the build to work in an intrinsically cross-platform way. Whether things like "configure" and "stpcpy" are reinvented out of plain ignorance, or they are being added to make the software Linux-centric out of malice, we would do well to take the high road, and avoid buying into these problems as much as possible. For stpcpy, if required by some package off the net, I believe the canonically correct thing to do is to provide an implementation as part of the source code for the software, giving the necessary changes back to the author, so that platforms which don't have the function can _all_ use the software, instead of limiting the software to FreeBSD and Linux, by adding stpcpy to a FreeBSD library. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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