GNU Grep & Sed: Fallout Within The GNU FSF Camp

[pingufunkybeat]

the FSF and GNU foundations are 20+ year old organizations that maintain a bunch of unix tools that are scarcely ever thought of any more. how terrible would it be if grep and sed fell out of existance tomorrow?

Remove all GNU software from your computer (not GPL-licensed, not FSF-endorsed, only the "GNU operating system" stuff) and see how far you get with that Seriously, try it, just for a laugh.

Anyway, as was commented elsewhere, this is a tempest in a teapot. A maintainer stepped down, but made it clear that he still supports the goals of the project. Big deal...

[kiwi_kid_aka_bod]

the FSF and GNU foundations are 20+ year old organizations that maintain a bunch of unix tools that are scarcely ever thought of any more. how terrible would it be if grep and sed fell out of existance tomorrow? how long before a couple fresh out of collage programmers would come up with a more feature ritch replacement written in a more maintainable codebase that was more easily integrated with modern componants.

Sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about.

I (plus many others) use the likes of sed and grep every day of our working life! Scarcely thought about? Not at all.

As to the idea of college fresh programmers coming up with something comparable in reasonable time? Hogwash! It would probably take a dozen years while they rewrote the code dozens of times based on increasing experience to fix all their early mistakes.

And during these dozen years yours system would be unusable because so much stuff would break! Try taking a look for grep, sed, and all the other GNU command line tools in your init scripts. Once the basics were available, we would still be banging our heads against a wall because of bugs or missing features. Ever tried to use the Solaris grep and sed commands? Complete PITA!

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Not so much as a "relic" but more of a jersey in need of retirement! In sports terminlogy it sounds slightly less disrespecful...

In all seriousness, Linux would not be what it is today without the GNU project; that's a fact that will always be true no matter how much GNU software we actually use in the future.

In all seriousness, Linux would not be what it is today without billions of dollars from Corporate Development.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about.

I (plus many others) use the likes of sed and grep every day of our working life! Scarcely thought about? Not at all.

As to the idea of college fresh programmers coming up with something comparable in reasonable time? Hogwash! It would probably take a dozen years while they rewrote the code dozens of times based on increasing experience to fix all their early mistakes.

And during these dozen years yours system would be unusable because so much stuff would break! Try taking a look for grep, sed, and all the other GNU command line tools in your init scripts. Once the basics were available, we would still be banging our heads against a wall because of bugs or missing features. Ever tried to use the Solaris grep and sed commands? Complete PITA!

Agreed. I've never met a serious developer on any UNIX platform that wasn't married to sed/grep/awk and when mastered could accomplish large amounts of work, in very small amounts of effort on their part.

[elanthis]

One does not simply tease Fallout players with a Linux port in the title without major disappointment after discovering it's not what we thought.

While I didn't at all think this was a port announcement from the title, the title did make me immediately think of Fallout. ... I'm pretty sure any use of that word would though.

[elanthis]

Try taking a look for grep, sed, and all the other GNU command line tools in your init scripts.

Not going to disagree with your post (you're spot on) but in response to that one sentence: systemd.

Remove all GNU software from your computer (not GPL-licensed, not FSF-endorsed, only the "GNU operating system" stuff) and see how far you get with that Seriously, try it, just for a laugh.

I'd actually be rather surprised if it wasn't possible to boot an entire modern Linux-based OS with zero GNU components these days. The shell environment would likely be rather unpleasant, but then the cutting-edge GNU/Linux shell environment is already unpleasant to 99.999% of human beings, so no big loss there. I bet you can boot up Linux, get into X11, and have a working KDE desktop without any "official" GNU components, right now.

Obviously, _building_ a modern Linux-based OS without using GNU software is still utterly impossible.

[Ibidem]

Not going to disagree with your post (you're spot on) but in response to that one sentence: systemd.




I'd actually be rather surprised if it wasn't possible to boot an entire modern Linux-based OS with zero GNU components these days. The shell environment would likely be rather unpleasant, but then the cutting-edge GNU/Linux shell environment is already unpleasant to 99.999% of human beings, so no big loss there. I bet you can boot up Linux, get into X11, and have a working KDE desktop without any "official" GNU components, right now.

Obviously, _building_ a modern Linux-based OS without using GNU software is still utterly impossible.

Let's see:
1. glibc -> uclibc/musl/bionic: I doubt this works as well as I wish it did.
2. init usually has some shell scripts -> needs sh, coreutils or replacement:
bash -> dash/mksh/zsh/ash
coreutils -> busybox
systemd might avoid this, but I doubt it's to the "boots without a shell installed" point.
sysvinit is nongnu, though.
3. X11: not GNU, may need shell; see 2
4. KDE: similar; while Alpine has Qt, they don't have kde. This may be #1 kicking in.
Some other desktops may be viable, though.

Re: building a linux distro:
I'm fairly sure that binutils and gmake are the only absolutely necessary GNU software.

[XorEaxEax]

GNU seems like such a relic of the past now.

Except of course it's software is default in pretty much every Linux installation out there, not to mention being supported or coming straight out of the box in other operatings systems like the BSD's, Haiku, Reactos, etc

Of course your response was not a reflection of reality, only your dislike for GNU, FSF and GPL.

[XorEaxEax]

Anyway, as was commented elsewhere, this is a tempest in a teapot. A maintainer stepped down, but made it clear that he still supports the goals of the project. Big deal...

Yes, but Michael will jump at anything which can further his anti-FSF agenda. And since the real thing wasn't as infective as he'd hoped, he decided to make up a 'FALLOUT within the GNU FSF camp' title while cherrypicking excerpts. What a surprise that the line where the author states that:

'I do support the ideas behind the FSF as strongly as ever; and I am grateful to the FSF staff for the support I have had since I joined the GNU project in 1999.'

- didn't make it into Michael's summary.

[XorEaxEax]

FSF blurting out something about a powerVR driver yet has mothing to show for it?

And who else does? They've drawn attention to PowerVR as something which lacks open source driver support, that doesn't mean they have the resources/information to do it themselves.

how long before a couple fresh out of collage programmers would come up with a more feature ritch replacement written in a more maintainable codebase that was more easily integrated with modern componants.

Go ahead, what's stopping you or anyone else from doing this, yet somehow this has failed to materialize. Probably because you know, the existing tools work very well and that people see little need of rewriting them in <insert high level language here>.