[clug] Kernels are easy, ls is the hard part!

[David Tulloh]

Sam Couter wrote:
> steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
>   
>>    RMS & friends invented "embrace and extend" long before Microsoft got
>> there...
>>     
>
> Except that their code is Free - you can compile and run it anywhere,
> distribute it, etc. No vendor lock-in there.
>
>   
But there is vendor lock-in, you still need to be using the GNU tool 
rather than the BSD variant of the tool.  The Freeness or 
not-so-freeness off the code is irrelevant here.

Take something as simple as cat, which was Steve's example.  GNU has 
several additional options for cat that BSD does not, namely the -E, -A 
and -T options.  The GNU man page does not document these as extensions 
either.  This means that if you use a shell script that relies on these 
options you cannot use the same shell script on a BSD system.

An extension that I've been bitten by before is the Argp section of the 
libc library.  Argp is a GNU extension so any program that uses argp 
cannot be run using a non-gnu c library, such as the one used by cygwin.


David