[Fwd: Re: RMS says: 'Use BSD, for goodness sake!']

[Paul Robinson]

----- Forwarded message from "James P. Howard II" <howardjp at vocito.com> -----

Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 10:17:06 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: RMS says: 'Use BSD, for goodness sake!'
From: "James P. Howard II" <howardjp at vocito.com>
To: <paul at iconoplex.co.uk>
Cc: <scrappy at hub.org>, <sphaleotas at blueyonder.co.uk>,
   <freebsd-chat at freebsd.org>
Reply-To: howardjp at vocito.com
X-Mailer: SquirrelMail (version 1.2.8)

The FreeBSD mailing lists are broken and reject mail from me, could you
forward this to the list for me?

Paul Robinson said:

> as - could be replaced, maybe even re-implmented.

This should be a part of gcc.

> awk - encourage people to port their code away from awk. Big.

Required by standards.  OpenBSD has removed GAWK in favor of the one true
awk.  It could probably be modified to support GAWK features pretty
easily.

> bc - an undergrad could re-implement based on man page

See dc.

> binutils - collection of some 20 smallish apps, all manageable

This should be a part of of any cc reimplemtnation effort.

> bzip2 - could be reimplemented

This isn't GPLd.

> cc - find an alternative compiler? From where?

This is the hard one.

> cpio - reimplement from man page, or replace/remove requirement for

cpio is required by standards.  OpenBSD reimplemented using pax.

> cvs - Don't need this do we? :-) look at another version control?

If rcs were rewritten, this would be a walk in the park.

> dc - see bc

bc is properly a dc preprocessor.  I completely reimplemented dc using
libgmp back in 1999.  It was perfect, except for the fact that precision
under dc is given base-10 and under GMP in base-2.  There was no work
around.

> dialog - need it now, kill it later, or re-implement based on man page

ports/misc/freedialog, something I did in 1999.  Just a wrapper for the
library, though.  The library is LGPLd.

> grep - the issue here is the regexp, otherwise re-implement.

OpenBSD on Sunday removed GNU grep in favor of freegrep, which was another
project from 1999.  It was a busy couple of months :)

> groff - look at alternate doc formatting?

Not likely.  Every man-page ever written needs groff.

> gzip - nasty, but re-implementable. Or we move to a non-GNU zip format.

libz itself is freely reusable.  Writing a wrapper should not be difficult.

> less - re-implementable quite quickly

I am not sure this is GPLd.

> libreadline - big one to replace, IMHO

Dump it.  What in the tree needs it?  gdb is, I think, it and any future
rewrite of gdb can use libedit.

> man - could be re-implemented based on file format information known

man is a wrapper for groff -Tascii -mdoc (okay, there is a bit more, but
it would not be difficult).

> ncurses - big, high-impact, hard to replace

Is there version from an earlier (Net/2ish) release of FreeBSD available?

> ptx - remove/replace/re-implement. Probably the former.

ptx is already gone.

> rcs - remove and make an optional package?

If you keep cvs, rcs is kind of useful to have around.

> send-pr - remove! OK, re-implement, if you must. :-)

It's a dozen-line shell script, easily redoable.

> sort - another undergrad project based on the man page

OpenBSD has a replacement.

> tar - find alternative, or re-implement

OpenBSD redid using pax.

> texinfo - find alternative, or remove from base

If the rest of the GNU tree were gone, texinfo would not be necessary :)

Jamie



----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Paul Robinson