GNU Grep & Sed: Fallout Within The GNU FSF Camp

[RealNC]

I'm fairly sure that binutils and gmake are the only absolutely necessary GNU software.

Bison, Flex, Gtk+, automake, autoconf, bash, coreutils, cpio, ed, ...

The list is rather big. However, many of those projects were put voluntarily under the GNU umbrella. They were not developed by GNU.

[Thaodan]

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

This don't excludes the GPL stuff, but what woud be if the linux kernel would BSD or something alike licensed?

[pingufunkybeat]

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.

It should be possible (BSDs get most of the way there, after all), but there is a good reason nobody does it

The vast majority of Linux distributions are very closely tied with GNU. Remove GNU from Fedora or Ubuntu and they will not boot. Making them boot again would be quite a lot of work.

My point was that just because somebody doesn't start bash and go sed-ing and grep-ing their way through source code, doesn't mean that they don't depend on GNU software every day.

[onicsis]

A GNU fork to a more flexible umbrella ?

[nslay]

It should be possible (BSDs get most of the way there, after all), but there is a good reason nobody does it

The vast majority of Linux distributions are very closely tied with GNU. Remove GNU from Fedora or Ubuntu and they will not boot. Making them boot again would be quite a lot of work.

My point was that just because somebody doesn't start bash and go sed-ing and grep-ing their way through source code, doesn't mean that they don't depend on GNU software every day.

Wait, hasn't Ubuntu been using dash for many years now?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh

BSD is almost completely free from GNU. I think gdb and ld are the only GNU components remaining ... and LLVM has infant projects for these two (not sure if BSD will pick them up though).

Admittedly, the newer BSD tools have less features and some even had performance problems (e.g. like BSD grep), but they're maturing

[crazycheese]

Wait, hasn't Ubuntu been using dash for many years now?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh

BSD is almost completely free from GNU. I think gdb and ld are the only GNU components remaining ... and LLVM has infant projects for these two (not sure if BSD will pick them up though).

Admittedly, the newer BSD tools have less features and some even had performance problems (e.g. like BSD grep), but they're maturing

[nslay]

If they really wanted to use BSD code, then so be it. It wouldn't affect the existing BSD projects in any way (i.e. they would still be open source).

BSD code will live on to solve real problems in corporate, government, academic and open source environments (and already has). I mean, imagine the applications of LAPACK and BLAS (used by everyone) for example ... now try imagining the same for GSL.

[gens]

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.

i made a usable, mostly feature complete, unix standard dd in assembly, and i am noob
took me... idk 7 weeks avg 1-2 max3 days a week couple hours a day (most of it was reading syscall codes and standards)


years ?
for a better programer then me ?


other GNU programs probably need years, but coreutils/binutils probably dont

[kazetsukai]

...but then the cutting-edge GNU/Linux shell environment is already unpleasant to 99.999% of human beings, so no big loss there.

As another poster pointed out.... completely and utterly false. Even going from GNU grep to Solaris grep is like trading (Transformers) Bumblebee for Triumph Stag, heaven forbid awk or something /slightly/ swiss-army-knife-ish.

Here though lies a true statement: Most GUIs that are pleasant to 99.999% of human beings are 99.999% unpleasant to people that actually want to get something real done.

[crazycheese]

If they really wanted to use BSD code, then so be it. It wouldn't affect the existing BSD projects in any way (i.e. they would still be open source).

BSD code will live on to solve real problems in corporate, government, academic and open source environments (and already has). I mean, imagine the applications of LAPACK and BLAS (used by everyone) for example ... now try imagining the same for GSL.