Official request: Please make GNU grep the default

Anonymous swell.k at gmail.com
Fri Aug 13 11:33:12 UTC 2010


Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> writes:

[...]
> My reason is simple, performance. While doing some portmaster work
> recently I was regression testing some changes I made to the --index*
> options and noticed that things were dramatically slower than the last
> time I tested those features. Thinking that I had made a programming
> mistake I dug into my code, and while the regexps that I was using could
> be tuned for slightly better performance the problem was not in my code.
> I then installed textproc/gnugrep to compare, and the differences were
> very dramatic using a highly pessimized test case (finding a match on
> the last line of INDEX). The script I used to test is at
> http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/grep-time-trial.sh.txt and a typical
> result was:
>
> GNU grep
> Elapsed time: 2 seconds
>
> BSD grep
> Elapsed time: 47 seconds

Why not allow people to use grep(1) from ports in portmaster, e.g. by
not overriding user-specified PATH?


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