Official request: Please make GNU grep the default

[Doug Barton]

On 08/14/2010 18:34, Steve Kargl wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 06:12:34PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>>
>> Sophisticated users who DO care about performance and/or DO use
>> grep in interesting and creative ways will put up with the breakage
>> for a while, then switch their make.conf to use GNU grep, usually
>> silently. Therefore they stop providing ANY test data at all, never
>> mind useful.
>>
>
> Whereas switching the default back to GNU grep

... until the performance is acceptably comparable ...

> *guarantees* neither unsophisticated nor sophosticated user will
> test BSD grep.

... except for those who are already highly motivated to do so.

> It seems that you are letting a poor design decision with respect to
> portmaster impair others contribution to FreeBSD.

I was hoping to avoid commenting on this, but my feeling (and I would be 
glad to be wrong about it) from reading the responses is that there is a 
fair degree of knee-jerk reaction to what seems to be "There's big bad 
dougb picking on some poor innocent developer again!" going on here; and 
criticizing MY development skills either A) makes you feel better, B) 
makes you think that you're dishing out to me a little of what you think 
I'm dishing out to Gabor, or both. Well fine, hope you're feeling good 
about yourself, and you made me feel really small and bad. Good on you.

Meanwhile, substitute my stupid way of doing things and defective 
programming skills for any other workload of your choice. Are you really 
going to tell me you've never had to grep a 20,000 line file? Are you 
really going to tell me that you've never had to grep something the size 
of the FreeBSD source and/or ports trees for all the instances of $FOO? 
And you didn't answer either of the questions I had in the post you 
responded to, so let me make it easier for you.

Our default grep should be significantly slower than the old grep because:

I think that new grep which is ____ times slower than the old grep is 
still in the acceptable range.


Doug

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