🚀 go-pugleaf

(I just noticed that there were discussions about GNU things going on
over here, and thought I'd chime in with a point or two that I didn't
see brought up before.  Sorry if some of this is rather dated...)

In article <95@euteal.ele.tue.nl> mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes:
   In article <14699@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> zuhn@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (david d [zoo] zuhn) writes:
      But in many UNIX installations ... [no-money] software ... is
      the only real way that we ...can get our hands on code.

   Why for Gods sake do you want to get your hands on the code.

Because code that we receive, from whatever source, is often broken,
or unsuitable to our environment.  For example, rwho broke when we
passed 255 (or some such number, I've forgotten by now) hosts because
it had a static limit coded in.  With source, it was quick enough to
fix.  For another less trivial example, a local communications
components company uses GCC as a cross-compiler for code that's to be
downloaded from a UNIX host to their own custom comm board processor.
They need sources to tweak the compiler for their own needs.

      ...You then can knock off their systems...

   Why would any one be interested in knocking off other peoples
   systems?

"Knock off" is an (American?) idiom for "copy", not for the Chicago
gangster-style "kill".

   What gnu does is rewriting the easy parts and give them away. Their
   support is nop.

After dealing with many vendors and dealing with the net, I'd rather
have direct, free, rapid access to the developers than use most
vendors' "support" structures.  Have you followed comp.sys.sun over
the years?  Sun's one of the best, but questions to the net get better
answers quicker.

   On our hp835 for instance, gcc is not running.

... yet.  GNU tools are useful to lots of people on lots of other
machines, though, and the set of supported machines is growing.

   By the way: Gnu is not unix but is it going to be a sys5 copy or
   bsd??  Or are they planning to make GNUX, a new free unix totally
   incompatible with either sys5 or bsd. I would prefer the last.

It will be more like BSD.  The best bet right right now is that GNU
looks like it will be based on the Mach kernel.

   I think the gnu stuff can only be usefull as supplementary software.
   It can never replace the base we need to do our work.

Right now, it is a lot of the base stuff I use to do my work.  Most of
the GNU tools that exist right now are software development stuff,
used for making other tools and bigger systems (like a kernel).
That's what I do.

In article <103@euteal.ele.tue.nl> mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes:
   In article <878@umb.umb.edu> karl@umb.umb.edu (Karl Berry.) writes:
      When the standard C runtime library is released, it
   
   Does this mean that gcc uses a vendor supplied C library ????

It will link against anything that's out there, available for use.

In article <13188@megaron.arizona.edu> cjeffery@arizona.edu (Clinton Jeffery) writes:
   ...And copylefting all works linked with the GNU runtime library is
   like copylefting all files edited with GNUemacs.

This is not a useful comparison.  If I edit a file, that file will
contain my work, not FSF's, so FSF has no control over it.  If I
incorporate someone else's work into something that I then distribute
as my own, then that other person has every reason to complain.

If I like, I can apply a copyleft to that file.  But how it was
created is immaterial, and I must exert my own effort to copyleft it.

In article <105@euteal.ele.tue.nl> mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes:

   Gnu starts out by relying on the vendor supplied !commercial!
   software they despise.

Any endeavor has a bootstrapping problem.  The makefiles supplied
with, (e.g.) gcc begin by compiling with the vendor-supplied cc.
Then, in order to get purely gcc-generated code, gcc compiles itself.

   If they were honest guys, they would start off with writing their
   own operating system.  Anyone can write an editor or a diff remake
   or maybe even a C compiler.

They're working on writing, or acquiring, an operating system.  First,
they needed tools that they could use to work on the OS.  I'd say
they're doing a lot to improve the quality of life of the average
programmer right now by distributing tools like Emacs and GCC.  They
could have kept that stuff in-house until the whole thing was
finished, but then far fewer people would have contributed and that's
the whole idea anyway: sharing the work and the results.

   When you talk about the quality of the gnu software: several years
   ago we have been porting Emacs to our hp9000s500. It contained lots
   of bugs and faulty programming. Just think of how long ago this
   program was written. Its about time it worked.

It does.  GNU Emacs has undergone a *lot* of change over the past
several years.  You might be pleasantly surprised by how much it has
improved if you last worked on it several years ago.
   
In article <107@euteal.ele.tue.nl> mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes:
   Didn't gnu intend to provide a new "free" unix version. Where is
   it?

It's in Pittsburgh, getting cleaned out.