RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!"

[Dag-ErlingSmørgrav]

"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy at hub.org> writes:
> Is there anything at the operating system level that uses/requires bc, or
> could it be moved to ports ... ?  Like, I use it, but its a command line
> tool, not something I've seen used in scripts ...

We care about POSIX.

> > > groff - look at alternate doc formatting?
> > Not bloody likely, unless you volunteer to convert all the man pages
> > (including translations).
> What was used before groff?  there was an nroff and troff before groff,
> no?  or is it just that there are alot of 'groff-isms' that we're using in
> the man pages?

Did we ever use anything else than groff?  

> > > less - re-implementable quite quickly
> > You might be surprised...
> ... but any reason why its part of hte main system instead of just put
> into ports?

POSIX requires more(1) (which in FreeBSD is a hard link to less(1)),
and it's not under GPL anyway (see /usr/src/contrib/less/LICENSE)

> > > man - could be re-implemented based on file format information known
> > This is a SMOP.
> SMOP? *raised eyebrow*

Small Matter Of Programming (though there are some locale issues)

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no