Comment by ninjin
11 hours ago
"Can't even match GNU's coreutils"? Care to elaborate? Last time I checked OpenBSD is pretty much in line with Posix and there are plenty of us that consider many of the GNU extensions to be anti-features.
11 hours ago
"Can't even match GNU's coreutils"? Care to elaborate? Last time I checked OpenBSD is pretty much in line with Posix and there are plenty of us that consider many of the GNU extensions to be anti-features.
I use a Mac, so the CLIs are the BSD versions. I don't have any opinion on which is better, but it's just annoying that it's different from GNU, so a lot of my work ends up being on a Linux VM or server instead. POSIX compliance doesn't seem to buy me anything. I like the BSD license though.
The GNU versions work fine in macOS. Apple doesn’t want to distribute them, but that’s mean you can’t use them.
> Apple doesn’t want to distribute them
Apple can't distribute them - coreutils is GPLv3, which is incompatible with Apple's immutable system volume.
4 replies →
Of course, but any script meant for Mac is going to assume Mac core utils, even assume zsh instead of bash. You don't want to be the one person on the team with a non-stock setup.
> The GNU versions work fine in macOS. Apple doesn’t want to distribute them, but that’s mean you can’t use them.
We also test GNU coreutils on macOS. It is a bit tricky since the other maintainers and I don't own any macOS machines for testing. But we seem to do well enough with a shared system that Adélie Linux kindly allows the compile farm [1] to use, along with some additional CI machines.
[1] https://portal.cfarm.net/
POSIX compliance doesn't buy you anything because you're trying to use GNU extensions, which aren't in POSIX.
I'm not trying to. And it's not even like GNU/Linux/whatever is a superset of POSIX and I'm using the extensions. There are mutual differences in basic functionality.
If you stick to POSIX, things generally work everywhere. It's not really a question of what is better, just what is portable.
I don't know how compatible my Mac will really be with a Free/OpenBSD machine. Last time I tested this theory, some C code I was building on Mac clang didn't build on FreeBSD clang cause I was unknowingly using some extension enabled by default. But that was about 12 years ago.
Sounds like it's Apple who's behind
In some cases they are, but that's not the cause for the mismatch vs GNU.
Thats exactly what I mean. I dont care about Posix or the whining about "anti-features". The BSD stuff is a clear subset that doesnt get the job done.
Posix is more an art form documenting the far gone past rather than a practical tool
What are some GNU coreutil extensions that you find you can't live without?
The conventions for the long parameters on the command line.
Dunno, since learning Xenix in 1993, I got plenty of work done in UNIX clones.
"[Doesn't] get the job done"? Well, it gets my job done. You are welcome to use whatever you subjectively prefer (I use GNU's date(1) for a few scripts, but would prefer the English date grammar parsing as a tool of its own), but if you are unable to talk about anything in concrete terms there is not point in trying to discuss in good faith and I will just roll my eyes and move on.
I am not the parent commenter, but I have the same sense that the GNU ones are better.
But the only concrete example I can think of is that `cat -n a b`, if `a` doesn't end in a newline, produces something that is obviously not what the user wanted. GNU cat does it right.
I didn't report it to the openbsd people because I didn't want them to yell at me that `-n` is nonstandard anyway with no "right" behavior, so I should STFU. Which would be what I'd expect from having reported problems in the past.