BitKeeper licence critic

Sun Mar 17 08:59:16 UTC 2002

>From jeroen at dekkers.cx Sun Mar 17 04:02:59 2002

>> >On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 04:44:41PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> >> >From jeroen at dekkers.cx Sat Mar 16 15:41:29 2002
>> >> >Nice. Do you also fix the bugs in solaris if you find them?
>> >>=3D20
>> >> There are much much less bug then in Linux. If I find a bug, I report =
>it.
>>=20
>> >And if they don't fix your reported bug? Or if it takes a month and
>> >you want to get something done which triggers that bug?
>>=20
>> Well if it ets fixed in months on Solaris this is much much faster than=
>=20
>> on Linux or even other GNU tools.

>For me it's just how long it takes to fix the bug.

To make it easier to understand for you: those sort of bugs that gets fixed
fast with Linux are not present on Solaris because Sun is doing a better job
with testing. The bugs that are fixed within months on Solaris are fixed within
years on Linux. You are right: it _is_ important how fast bugs are fixed ;-)

>> GNU make bugs are not fixed in years too. GNU make is still handling=20
>> 'include' statements wrong although I posted a bug report more than
>> 3 years ago :-(

>Did you include a patch? AFAIK I see you didn't. Reading the archives,

Why should I spend my time on a badly written make program when I have my
own make program that does what I like?

You did not understand how software development works....

If there is a simple problem that couls be fixed by anybody, it could be
fixed in seconds by the original author. If there is a problem that 
is hard to find because the structure of the program is bad (as with GNU make)
then the original author is the only person who is able to fix the problem
within a reasonable time.

So you found the proof that the persons envolved with GNU make don't even
understand how to use make decently.

In fact the method shown in this mail is deprecated and the only method
that works correctly is the method I use in the Schily makefile system.
Ifg somebody believes that dependencies must not be put into platform
dependant sub directories he simply did not understand how to create a portable
multi platform make system.

The basic rule for any make program is:

	try first to make anything before you try to use it.

While GNU make does make the Makefile before using it (e.g. by retrieving
it from SCCS) it does not make make files to be included even if there is a 
rule.

>I try to make the Hurd POSIX compliant. I don't develop Linux nor
>GDB. If you want to see anything, you can always pay somebody to
>implement it. It might be a better use of your money then buying
>solaris licenses.

I don't need to pay somebody to make GDB better because I get a better
debugger for fre with Solaris. As I am sure that you don't have machines
with >= 8 CPUs to do your development work, Solaris is free.
Don't tell thigs you should know better.

>> Tht GNUtar command line systax is not POSIX compliant _and_ it is much
>> worse than the one from star.=20

>POSIX compliant command line syntax sucks and isn't compatible with
>the GNU Coding Standards. A nice free standard has a higher priority
>for me than some crappy non-free standard.

The GNU coding standard suck.

>> I am usng star on a dayly base since 1984 (long before GNUtar exists).

>I use GNU tar since I've started using tar. I never had any problems
>with it other than that it doesn't support translators and or GNU
>extensions to the filesystem.

So you never received POSIX compliant tar archives and never did more
than simple stuff with GNU tar.

If you believe that mkisofs needs to be ported to HURD before you can
send bug reports, then do it. The Schiloy makefile system is a easy to use
portability framework. Just compile smake and then go forth...

Jörg

 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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