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Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

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41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#41
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I need a free account? What is the purpose of that? I get a compiler from BSD, which is the source of Apple's code, without needing any account. Apple didn't need an account to get that code from BSD. Apple seems to do a disservice to the notion of the BSD license, which is not to impose restrictions on people (e.g. making them get a developer "account").

It sounds like you need a reminder that OS X is not based on BSD, it's a different operating system that had a lot of BSD stuff grafted on to the side of it - like Windows, but moreso. Also, BSD doesn't provide a compiler - they use GNU's compiler, and are switching to Apple's compiler.

Yes, I did need that reminder. Memory is failing today. But... does it change my question? GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account".

OSX is not BSD, but there's no way it could even think about calling itself "UNIX" and getting certified as such without all the BSD code they took.

What else is OS X? It's a kernel from CMU. And whiz bang graphics. And lots of annoyances.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually disagree on this point. Ubuntu has introduced a number of refinements to the dpkg world that have been pretty good. Most useful, in my mind, is their set of tools for working with PPAs. They're much simpler to run than setting up an entire new repository of packages.

Seriously? You think that PPAs and your other unnamed improvements tower over the apt package management system? Without PPAs apt-get would be yet another kludgy package management system? Sure apt-add-repository is a nice time saver but how hard is: echo deb http://repo.net/ unstable main >> /etc/apt/sources.list I think we might be miscommunicating because I can't imagine anyone making this argument. I'm not sure h…

With respect to PPAs, I'm not speaking from a user perspective, but from that of a sysadmin having to maintain mirrors. PPAs are just easier than setting up all the key signing and mirror infrastructure.

Yeah, apt and dpkg are great compared to what else was available a decade ago. But that doesn't mean that Ubuntu's additions, however incremental, are worthless or somehow inferior to Debian. Incremental gains are still gains.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's current C compiler, clang, did not originate in the BSD project, but is primarily developed by Apple itself.

This is a good point. Although that word "primarily" is interesting. Is Clang BSD-licensed?

It's UIUC's license, which looks similar to BSD to me. They also have some MIT licensed code. http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's current C compiler, clang, did not originate in the BSD project, but is primarily developed by Apple itself.

This is a good point. Although that word "primarily" is interesting. Is Clang BSD-licensed?

Essentially, yes. It's NCSA-OSL which is based on MIT, which is based on BSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

Many projects use Clang/LLVM for their OpenCL implementations.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#45
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Why do I need a free account? What is the purpose of that? I get a compiler from BSD, which is the source of Apple's code, without needing any account. Apple didn't need an account to get that code from BSD. Apple seems to do a disservice to the notion of the BSD license, which is not to impose restrictions on people (e.g. making them get a developer "account").

And if I may add, I hate the fact that I have to put credit card information on this free account.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fi…

So, in theory, FSF can overnight change the license of all GNU softwares to shareware and sell them?

That's really fucked up. (I trust they won't do such a thing, but I didn't think such a thing could be possible)

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#47
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you need a reminder that OS X is not based on BSD, it's a different operating system that had a lot of BSD stuff grafted on to the side of it - like Windows, but moreso. Also, BSD doesn't provide a compiler - they use GNU's compiler, and are switching to Apple's compiler.

Yes, I did need that reminder. Memory is failing today. But... does it change my question? GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account". OSX is not BSD, but there's no way it could even think about calling itself "UNIX" and getting certified as such without all the BSD code they took. What else is OS X? It's a kernel from CMU. And whiz bang graphics. And lots of annoyances.

> GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account".

What an outrageous thing... They force you to create a free account that wastes quite literally 6 minutes of your time... It's unacceptable, how dare they??!!1 (<-- sarcasm)

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fi…

So, in theory, FSF can overnight change the license of all GNU softwares to shareware and sell them? That's really fucked up. (I trust they won't do such a thing, but I didn't think such a thing could be possible)

Well it's more likely than you might think over a span of a couple decades...

But, I think if they were to go rogue it would be a matter of forking a GPL-licensed version of the software and continuing development on that under an open license.

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#49
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.

Yeah, just use pcregrep

Re: Perl Regex Removed From Grep in Mountain Lion

#50

This bit me in our "golden file" checking portion of our product's test suite. I moved the golden file checking regex to a Perl script. Apple's obsession with removing GNU utilities has been annoying but I suppose the test suite should have taken grep portability problems into account.

Yes it should have. You could still run into problems as PCRE regexes are not quite the same as Perl regexes. Why not just check for and use pcregrep?
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