From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 21 14:06:43 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA29679 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 21 May 1996 14:06:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA29671 for ; Tue, 21 May 1996 14:06:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id OAA02018; Tue, 21 May 1996 14:01:07 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199605212101.OAA02018@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Utilities and POSIX compliance.... To: kline@tera.com (Gary Kline) Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 14:01:07 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <199605211857.LAA20510@athena.tera.com> from "Gary Kline" at May 21, 96 11:57:40 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > `wc' is missing the -m (multibyte) flag, and I expect that > other of the language/locale-specific utilities are missing > these hooks. "Multibyte" is an evil, evil implementation of internationalization (the process of making software localizable to a particular locale using only data and environment, not code changes). It doesn't deal at all with multinationalization (the process of making software capable of simultaneously operating in several locales, generally useful only for translators and language scholars). I really can't be too sad about missing bogus locale implementation flags. > Can any of the BSD gurus point me at the person or persons > who are working on the utilities? Since there are around > 300 utilities, I'm guessing that there are several people > involved. > > I'd like to know why more of the Berkeley utilities aren't > POSIX-compliant. That is, why, without some minor--or even > major--hacks, these utilities haven't been brought up to > standard. The BSD kernel is A++, but not the utils... . I believe they are all i18n. The general consensus is to not POSIX'ify if there will be a significant loss of functionality, or if doing so would mean moving from a BS source to a GPL'ed one. I believe nmost of the Lite2 code has not been integrated -- there are supposedly some serious strides towards POSIX in some of the unintegrated code. > PS: I'm _not_ asking why BSD/FreeBSD doesn't use more of the > GNU ports... . Terry mumbled something about licensing or > policy or philosophy that went right over my head! Consider it mumbled again... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.