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Comment by mahboi

9 hours ago

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.

14 comments

mahboi

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jonhohle  8 hours ago

The GNU versions work fine in macOS. Apple doesn’t want to distribute them, but that’s mean you can’t use them.

  • duskwuff  7 hours ago

    > Apple doesn’t want to distribute them

    Apple can't distribute them - coreutils is GPLv3, which is incompatible with Apple's immutable system volume.

    • Kwpolska  5 hours ago

      That's a brand new excuse, Apple refused to distribute GPLv3 when GPLv3 was first published, 20ish years ago. How is GPLv3 incompatible with their system volume, yet GPLv2 is still fine?

      3 replies →

  • mahboi  7 hours ago

    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.

  • collinfunk  8 hours ago

    > 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/

thesuitonym  6 hours ago

POSIX compliance doesn't buy you anything because you're trying to use GNU extensions, which aren't in POSIX.

  • mahboi  6 hours ago

    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.

frumplestlatz  8 hours ago

If you stick to POSIX, things generally work everywhere. It's not really a question of what is better, just what is portable.

  • mahboi  7 hours ago

    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.