4 ms·

I think you’re actually making the point for him here. You are correct that GNU is not Unix. And what version of ls has the most installations? I betcha it’s th

by cpach 3y ago

I think you’re actually making the point for him here. You are correct that GNU is not Unix. And what version of ls has the most installations? I betcha it’s the ls from GNU Coreutils. I do agree that GNU tools are sometimes too maximalist. But they are also more useful than the minimalist alternatives.

abwizz 3y ago
seems like you agree that the extra flags make sense
- cpach 3y ago
  In many cases, yes! On my Mac, which has a userland derived from FreeBSD, I have voluntarily installed stuff like GNU Findutils and GNU sed to get that extra functionality.
tuukkah 3y ago
To me, the point is you don't need many flags for ls to be useful. You will learn a few idioms early, such as ls -a and ls -lR but after that, the rest of the flags are nice to haves: if you wish there was a certain feature, you can look it up on the man pages etc. "I wish I could sort by time - oh there's -t"
throwaway31381 3y ago
I don't believe GNU's triumph over the BSD derivates was for the most part technical, they just happened to be at the right moment at the right time to ride along Linux's success. A consequence of the proliferation of arguments in the GNU tools is imho that it made the GNU manpages too verbose and information dense to the detriment of their usefulness.
- cpach 3y ago
  Good point. However: The users could have revolted and gone to *BSD land instead. But for some reason, most users didn’t.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    That is because of the "lawsuite", unless you are referring to the 80s. Back then, Companies and Colleges were the ones who got UNIX. Companies went with AT&T, and IIRC Colleges when with BSD. So AT&T won out due to better financial backing and maybe a possible threat of AT&T going after BSD.
    - cpach 3y ago
      Well, Linux is 30 now. The lawsuite was settled quite long ago, wasn’t it?
      - jmclnx 3y ago
        You did not specify a timeline. The book was written in 1984, BSD existed then and the only other UNIX was AT&T. Linux was not even a dream in 1984.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's exactly why RMS is so pissed at Linux being mentioned without GNU. The funny thing is that it is the license he shipped his code under that allowed them to do this, he could have made the license say 'if you use this code you are required to prefix the name of any project with 'GNU/'' and that would have been that. If you give people rights and freedom they will use them.
  - toast0 3y ago
    If he wanted advertising/acknowledgement, he might have considered the BSD license instead.

by cpach 3y ago

abwizz 3y ago

seems like you agree that the extra flags make sense

cpach 3y ago
In many cases, yes! On my Mac, which has a userland derived from FreeBSD, I have voluntarily installed stuff like GNU Findutils and GNU sed to get that extra functionality.

tuukkah 3y ago

To me, the point is you don't need many flags for ls to be useful. You will learn a few idioms early, such as ls -a and ls -lR but after that, the rest of the flags are nice to haves: if you wish there was a certain feature, you can look it up on the man pages etc. "I wish I could sort by time - oh there's -t"

throwaway31381 3y ago

I don't believe GNU's triumph over the BSD derivates was for the most part technical, they just happened to be at the right moment at the right time to ride along Linux's success. A consequence of the proliferation of arguments in the GNU tools is imho that it made the GNU manpages too verbose and information dense to the detriment of their usefulness.

cpach 3y ago
Good point. However: The users could have revolted and gone to *BSD land instead. But for some reason, most users didn’t.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  That is because of the "lawsuite", unless you are referring to the 80s. Back then, Companies and Colleges were the ones who got UNIX. Companies went with AT&T, and IIRC Colleges when with BSD. So AT&T won out due to better financial backing and maybe a possible threat of AT&T going after BSD.
  - cpach 3y ago
    Well, Linux is 30 now. The lawsuite was settled quite long ago, wasn’t it?
    - jmclnx 3y ago
      You did not specify a timeline. The book was written in 1984, BSD existed then and the only other UNIX was AT&T. Linux was not even a dream in 1984.
jacquesm 3y ago
That's exactly why RMS is so pissed at Linux being mentioned without GNU. The funny thing is that it is the license he shipped his code under that allowed them to do this, he could have made the license say 'if you use this code you are required to prefix the name of any project with 'GNU/'' and that would have been that. If you give people rights and freedom they will use them.
- toast0 3y ago
  If he wanted advertising/acknowledgement, he might have considered the BSD license instead.