Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:00:47 -0700 (MST) From: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> To: mwm@mired.org Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: find -lname and -ilname implemented Message-ID: <20080223.110047.-397883947.imp@bsdimp.com> In-Reply-To: <20080223123556.3eee709d@bhuda.mired.org> References: <20080222.225937.-146245356.imp@bsdimp.com> <20080223.000308.686168314.imp@bsdimp.com> <20080223123556.3eee709d@bhuda.mired.org>
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In message: <20080223123556.3eee709d@bhuda.mired.org>
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> writes:
: On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:03:08 -0700 (MST) "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
:
: > Sorry to be lame and follow up to my original email, but Ruslan was
: > way too quick to give me feedback :-)
: >
: > I also did a few more of the really easy ones, and added a list of
: > ones that we haven't implemented yet.
: >
: > Comments?
:
: How about a question: why are you turning the FreeBSD find into the
: GNU find? The changes in the first patch looked like they added real
: functionality that wasn't available in other tools. These seem to be
: gratuitous changes to make things compatible with GNU.
The changes aren't gratuitous. They are well thought out to ensure
maximum compatibility.
: If I want a GNU-compatible find on FreeBSD, I can install the
: misc/findutils port. If I really wanted the GNU toolset, I could run
: them on a Linux kernel. However, I'm more comfortable with the Unix
: toolset (which GNU, as it's own name points out, *isn't*), so the
: direction taken by these patches make me more than a bit
: uncomfortable.
I looked for a bit last night and couldn't find the gnu find port. It
was faster and easier for me to implement the trivial bit of
functionality in our find than to try to compile gnu's findutils from
scratch. I know, I'm lame because I could find it in the list, so
that's a weak excuse.
: Hence the question: why are you turning the FreeBSD find into the GNU
: find?
Because, frankly, I'm getting tired of installing the gnu versions of
the tools for trivial reasons. I don't like doing that. Openwrt
requires certain features of GNU find. There's no reason why these
features shouldn't be present in the base system find. None. It is
absolutely silly install a whole other program when our find would
need such trivial tweaks to make it work.
It is yet another barrier to entry for people converting from Linux to
FreeBSD. There's lots of useful scripts that have been written for
the embedded world that, sadly, assume more functionality in our tools
than are present. They don't always do nice autoconf things to find
the right tool to use. The trivial differences between gnu find and
our find serve no real purpose.
I can dig up numbers for the size difference in the code, but my
experience tells me it is less than 1k. This is a lot more efficient
than installing gnufind, which must be > 1k in size.
Warner
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