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Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

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Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#21

Post by Hemospectrum »

__david__ wrote: post #13
Hemospectrum wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the introduction of the GPL3, there's been a steady purge of GNU software from OS X. This is why Apple's GCC, bash, etc. are stuck at old versions lacking a variety of useful features. I'm kind of curious what they'll do about Emacs. It doesn't have a BSD-licensed counterpart like everything else they've removed... Maybe they'll just leave it out.

The built in Emacs is languishing along side the built-in bash. It's GNU Emacs 22.1 from "2007 April 13" (according to the man page) which is going on 5 years old at this point. The current release of Emacs is 24.2. You can get a binary of it here: http://www.emacsformacosx.com/

I already do this, even though I rarely use Emacs. Presumably those who work with it every day are far more hampered than me by a five-year-old installation. So my actual (rhetorical) question for Apple is whether there's a point to keeping around a version of Emacs so out of date that anyone using it would install their own copy anyway.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#22

Post by mynegation »

zem wrote: post #4

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, a seamless gui experience atop a full-fledged posix core complete with a bash prompt you can drop down to as easily as you can in linux, but philosophically it seems that for the little things like package management, command line utilities, etc.…

I may be a Linux fan, but there you go: Mac OS X as Unix is inferior to Linux. Package management in Ubuntu is second to none, I have newer version of everything, sane terminal colors and fonts out of the box, I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler, compiling some non-mainstream sources may not work out of the box.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#23

Post by tl »

gizmo686 wrote: post #20
Hemospectrum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, all GNU software went to GPLv3. Literally all of it. Even things with no substantial updates since 2007.

Isn't (one of) the points of the GPL that you cannot change the licensing of the software?

If you hold the copyright, new versions can be under whatever license you want. Old versions cannot have their license changed.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#24

Post by ConstantineXVI »

js2 wrote: post #5

http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDgrep BSD grep has been imported to 9.0-CURRENT on July 22, 2010. It has been obtained from the OpenBSD and the FreeGrep projects to make it appropriate for our needs to provide GNU compatibility and let ports build without problems. GNU compatibility is almost 100%, the only missing feature is -P (--perl-regex), which is not possible to support without having PCRE in base system and anyway,…

Doubt there was anyone at Apple concerned or willing enough to take the time/effort to port -P into bsdgrep.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#25

Post by SwellJoe »

gizmo686 wrote: post #20
Hemospectrum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, all GNU software went to GPLv3. Literally all of it. Even things with no substantial updates since 2007.

Isn't (one of) the points of the GPL that you cannot change the licensing of the software?

The copyright holder can do anything they want with the license of the software, including change it. What has been released under older versions of the license cannot be taken back, as millions of people received the software under the old license...so if you received a version of Emacs under GPL v2, you have every right to continue to distribute it under the terms of that license, and you have no ability to alter those terms (since you are not the copyright holder). But, the GNU foundation (who holds the copyright for Emacs and all GNU software) has every right to alter what license they distribute new versions of the software under.

A lot of people have a lot of weird superstitions about the GPL. It's probably useful to read the license sometime. It may also be useful to acquire a basic understanding of copyright law, if you are a software developer.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#26

Post by Hemospectrum »

gizmo686 wrote: post #20
Hemospectrum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, all GNU software went to GPLv3. Literally all of it. Even things with no substantial updates since 2007.

Isn't (one of) the points of the GPL that you cannot change the licensing of the software?

Short answer: Not quite.

Long answer: One of the conditions for contributing code to the GNU project is assigning copyright to the FSF. That means they're legally the sole copyright holders for all software they distribute. The official reason for this is so they can pursue GPL violations in court without involving the actual authors of the code. It also permits them to change the license on any of their software. Finally, there are various reasons they might be able to do this anyway even if they didn't have the copyright assignment rule, so long as the new restrictions didn't conflict with whatever license the original software was distributed under.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#27

Post by Evbn »

tomwalsham wrote: post #12
zem wrote: post #4

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, a seamless gui experience atop a full-fledged posix core complete with a bash prompt you can drop down to as easily as you can in linux, but philosophically it seems that for the little things like package management, command line utilities, etc.…

These sorts of issues (primarily related to auxiliary functions in grep, sed, etc) can cause portability issues when developing locally for linux systems, but no worse thanks, say, writing for fedora on an Ubuntu box. Brew is okay but a bit sparse. For me I mostly miss Gnome

It is worse. Fedora is Linux. OS X is BSD.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#28

Post by dfc »

mynegation wrote: post #22
zem wrote: post #4

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, a seamless gui experience atop a full-fledged posix core complete with a bash prompt you can drop down to as easily as you can in linux, but philosophically it seems that for the little things like package management, command line utilities, etc.…

I may be a Linux fan, but there you go: Mac OS X as Unix is inferior to Linux. Package management in Ubuntu is second to none, I have newer version of everything, sane terminal colors and fonts out of the box, I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler, compiling some non-mainstream sources may not work out of the box.

Package management in Ubuntu is not second to none, it is second to Debian. Dont get me wrong Ubuntu has done a lot of wonderful things, but lets give credit where credit is due...

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#29

Post by glassx »

mynegation wrote: post #22
zem wrote: post #4

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, a seamless gui experience atop a full-fledged posix core complete with a bash prompt you can drop down to as easily as you can in linux, but philosophically it seems that for the little things like package management, command line utilities, etc.…

I may be a Linux fan, but there you go: Mac OS X as Unix is inferior to Linux. Package management in Ubuntu is second to none, I have newer version of everything, sane terminal colors and fonts out of the box, I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler, compiling some non-mainstream sources may not work out of the box.

> I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler.

They fixed that. On newer OS X versions you can download the Command Line Tools (just 110mb) from Apple's website. You just need a free account: https://developer.apple.com/downloads

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#30

Post by ubernostrum »

gizmo686 wrote: post #20
Hemospectrum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, all GNU software went to GPLv3. Literally all of it. Even things with no substantial updates since 2007.

Isn't (one of) the points of the GPL that you cannot change the licensing of the software?

Basically all FSF-curated projects ask for contributors to assign copyright to the FSF. Which means the FSF ends up owning the rights to all the code, and can (as the copyright holder) switch to a different license for new versions.
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