From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Sep 7 20:12:59 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 010B916A4F2; Thu, 7 Sep 2006 20:12:59 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from smtp8.server.rpi.edu (smtp8.server.rpi.edu [128.113.2.228]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9170343D55; Thu, 7 Sep 2006 20:12:58 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by smtp8.server.rpi.edu (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id k87KCufd021231; Thu, 7 Sep 2006 16:12:57 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200609071057.44515.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <200608281545.k7SFjn6l063922@lurza.secnetix.de> <44FF71AD.7060508@FreeBSD.org> <44FF72B9.7000201@elischer.org> <200609071057.44515.jhb@freebsd.org> Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 16:12:56 -0400 To: John Baldwin , freebsd-current@freebsd.org From: Garance A Drosihn Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-CanItPRO-Stream: default X-RPI-SA-Score: undef - spam-scanning disabled X-Scanned-By: CanIt (www . canit . ca) Cc: Subject: Re: Attempt #3, adding a new command 'sfilter' X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:12:59 -0000 At 10:57 AM -0400 9/7/06, John Baldwin wrote: >On Wednesday 06 September 2006 21:15, Julian Elischer wrote: > > >> perl is not lightweight to install on a machine. >> have you seen how much crap gets installed when you add perl? >> >> lightweight is adding 100 instructions or so to 'date'. >> or adding the strftime instruction to awk (as it is in gawk) > >Why not install the gawk port on the machines you need this on >rather than perl and use gawk then? It doesn't look to be that >heavyweight of a port. It seems reasonable to me to add a strftime() (and maybe a few other features) to our base-system awk. But look at what happens if we install gawk: -r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 115732 May 29 21:01 /usr/bin/awk* -r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1201108 Sep 7 15:39 /usr/local/bin/gawk* Again we're adding a 1-meg binary, and in doing that we duplicate 115K's worth of features that the base OS already provided. It seems to me that duplication should also qualify as evil bloat. It also means that I could never take advantage of this strftime() function in some awk script that I wanted to write for the base system. [(Hmm, that reminds me about something...)] Perhaps we could add a few features to `awk', but only have those incompatible features available when the program is invoked under some new name. We already do that to provide `nawk'. But then the bikeshed will be which features to add! I (for one) don't want the base-OS awk to grow by 1037% in size, so I certainly don't want all the features from `gawk'. Just a few key ones, and maybe a few more that aren't in any of the existing awk's. We could name the new version "base awk", or `bawk'. Imagine the satisfaction of saying "I'm going to bawk at that"... Okay, that name was picked for comic value, and it seems there is already a version of awk called bawk. But the basic idea could work out, if we could get it past the bikeshed stage and actually *do* it. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu