Official request: Please make GNU grep the default

[Doug Barton]

On 08/19/2010 04:13, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> It would have been far more "constructive and distinctively polite" to
> take ten minutes to build and run a profiling version of grep, and
> include the results in the OP.

Meta-comment first. des and I are both people of strong opinions, and we 
agree on more than we disagree on. I have no problem with him stating 
his opinion here, and I don't care if he agrees with me after I state 
mine. :)

There are 2 questions, did I do the right thing, and how should people 
report problems in general. As for myself, while I have some facility in 
C it's not my strong suit. Yes, I could have produced a profiling 
version of grep, but it would have taken me a lot more than 10 minutes 
because I don't even build the profiled libs on a regular basis. In this 
specific case I also didn't think it was "my job" to do so. Gabor is the 
one developing BSD grep, as far as I'm concerned it's up to him to get 
its performance up to par. I certainly have no objection to others 
helping him, and I'm glad that raising the issue of performance has 
resulted in more attention and assistance being directed at the problem. 
But I feel that I did my part by providing simple to reproduce test 
cases that Gabor could use.

More generally however I think that we need to be realistic with what we 
expect people to do about reporting problems. We WANT more "regular 
users" to use -current early on in the development cycle, and if they 
see problems to report them. Chastising people for not doing profiling 
runs of things that they are reporting problems with is not going to 
accomplish that goal.


Doug

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