Poettering: The Biggest Myths [LWN.net]

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 29, 2013 16:18 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Poettering: The Biggest Myths by khim
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

This is very explicitly not some nirvana of free-for-all pick-and-choose, but a set of decisions made by sane people: they used system versions of tools where it was harder to port binutils to the new platform and the forced GNU tools in most other cases.

This is entirely incorrect. System versions of tools are supported for toolchain building where they are not too broken to work reliably, particularly if it seems likely that people would otherwise need to resort to cross-compilation to get the thing built on that platform. Heck, the horrible bundled K&R HP-UX 10.x C compiler was supported for many many years, despite barely grasping advanced concepts like functions: if your allegations were true it would never have been supported at all. (It is true that, these days, it is much easier to cross-compile from a random Linux system than it ever was before, so tolerance for totally broken crap like that is going down. On the gnulib list, they say "we are not running a software archaeology project", and they are quite right.)

Unfortunately there are a lot of broken assemblers, linkers and the like out there. (Oddly, one of the most often broken components is sed. sed! How hard is it to write a working sed, I ask you...)

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Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 30, 2013 0:48 UTC (Wed) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

(Oddly, one of the most often broken components is sed. sed! How hard is it to write a working sed, I ask you...)

Heh, I bet most of the broken implementations started out with that exact thinking..."how hard could this be?"

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 30, 2013 16:30 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Most of it seemed to be classic Unix thinking, "we can just use a fixed N-character buffer here, nobody will want more than X of these". So you get fun like seds that coredump if you use more than 512 characters in an s// expression's regexp part, and that sort of thing. A crashing sed tends to annoy configure scripts...