Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

Post by nuclear_eclipse » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 11:59 AM UTC

avar wrote: post #89

rbanffy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a fair amount of truth in the old joke that BSD is for people that love Unix, and Linux is for people that hate Microsoft Curious... I always thought BSD was for people who hate GNU, Linux, the GPL... ;-) The wise route out of this problem is to create an info2man utility that converts info pages into man pages. Can't be that hard, can it? And, once you learn your way around it, info is much nicer than man…

It already exists: http://packages.qa.debian.org/i/info2man.html It's odd that Debian doesn't simply use it instead of creating their own bastardized manpages of GNU programs.

     The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead.  *Unfortunately, the
     info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it
     impossible to include any text from that document in this man page*.  Most of the text in this document
     was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source.  It may not completely describe all
     features of the program.

Post by loewenskind » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 12:07 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #82

loewenskind wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The GCC compiler and toolchain aren't optimal, and I fully expect a major Linux distribution to switch to Clang/LLVM in the not too distant future. Have you looked through the Linux kernel code? There is a lot of gcc specific stuff in there. I don't think the Clang change will be as fast as you think.

The worst that can happen is porting GCC features over to a GPL-licensed Clang fork.

Post by nailer » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 12:21 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #83

flomo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't want to instigate a flamewar, but think for a second about the dogmatic bias required to create a slogan such as "GPL-incompatible". This is a pot-kettle situation if there ever was one.

Not really. The effect of Sun licensing dtrace, ZFS and others as GPL-compatible would make Linux more competitive with Sun's Solaris. That's clearly undesirable. Sun faces a lot of competition from IBM and HP, both with offers to migrate to AIX/HP-UX and to Linux on x86 hardware. Enhancing Linux was a big no-no for them.

Post by nailer » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 12:24 PM UTC

avar wrote: post #88

tzs wrote: post #66

One nice thing about the BSDs is that their users don't get annoying things like this when they look for basic manual pages: The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. The maintainer of tar falls into this category. This man page is neither complete, nor current, and was included in the Debian Linux packaging of tar entirely to reduce the frequency with which the lack of a man page…

That's a bit like complaining that when I use the BSDs they don't have documentation in Microsoft CHM format, or that they put stuff in /usr/local. Different systems simply have different conventions, and GNU picked GNU Info over man pages. That bastard GNU tar(1) man page was created because Debian has a policy that everything must have a manpage. I like Unix, but the GNU Info format solved some real issues with man…

Post by nailer » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 12:29 PM UTC

bl4k wrote: post #58

I have been an OpenBSD and FreeBSD user, as well as minor contributor, since the mid-90s. All the answers here are good, and I would like to add: * FreeBSD is on the cutting edge of performance. Because it is a total OS (as opposed to just a kernel), performance improvements are made and integrated into the binary packages and ports build options of common packages. FreeBSD was one of the first operating systems to i…