FreeBSD Decision

[Chris Rees]

On 15 January 2011 01:56, James Phillips <anti_spam256 at yahoo.ca> wrote:

<snip>


> One thing to keep in mind is that BSD speaks a different POSIX "dialect" than most Linux distros (though that is likely true between Linux distros as well). This means things like NFS/NIS won't work without tweaking. One thing I also ran into is that md5sum (Debian) ~= md5 (BSD). I suppose you are supposed to use SHA2 these days anyway :P
>

<rant>

I'd like to jump in and say that the 'dialect' that the GNU utilities
use often have a very strange interpretation of POSIX. Many porters
(for example) have to spend huge amounts of time repairing GNUisms in
install scripts; for example when I was helping to port Scilab
(Bashisms in '['), and some work I've done on Busybox has meant I've
had to work around GNUisms in sed and find.

On the risk of starting a flame war, I believe that the GNU folks are
guilty of exactly the same embracing and extension tactics (however
unwittingly) as everyone's favourite software corp.

</rant>

Chris