Based on a patch from Tobias ‘ibotty’ Florek, Eirik Nygaard has set DragonFly to build only Brian Kernighan’s One True awk. gawk, the GNU version of awk, is out. I’ll just take a geek moment here and point out Kernighan’s “The Practice of Programming” is one of my favorite computer books ever.
10 Replies to “gawk gone”
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that book is one of my favorites too. glad to see awk instead of gawk :)
For the unenlightened out there could someone explain why this is a good thing? or at least what the reasoning was? Don’t get wrong it doesn’t matter much to me which version of awk Dragonfly ships. I simply don’t know enough to interpret this new post properly, or interpret it as anything other than “Oh, I guess they switched because One True awk ‘s license is more inline with theirs.”
Well, I’d imagine that it has to do with two things, the first is that “the one true awk” was the first (and many would argue) still the best of breed implementation of awk.
Second, it’s always nice to remove GPL’d code from a project that desires it’s code to be freely usable by all comers for all pruposes, and GPL’d code has too many restrictions to allow that.
Additionally to the license issues, GNU awk doesn’t offer many features nawk (the one true :-) )doesn’t have.
Most awk scripts are written with nawk compatibility in mind anyway and run on nawk, gawk and mawk without problems.
Without benchmarks, the version of gawk we had in tree might also be slower than the nawk.
So basically what you guys are saying is that Gawk is a cheap Nawk-off that is making a Mawk-ery of “The One True Awk?”
One True awk is smaller, faster and much lesser bugs than gawk. It can do the more offers than gawk does, so it’s reasonable to remove gawk as a replacement.
As for the license, I would less care about it. Because, BSD will stuck with the third-party of GNU/GPL (possible more like) forever due to GCC, Binutils and etc. Therefore, the agreement of the BSD vs GPL license is 99% pointless and useless.
For example: It’s why I don’t support for anyone to replace the GNU diff to OpenBSD diff, just because of the BSD vs GPL license. I only will support if OpenBSD diff can offer the more, better and faster than what GNU diff can offer.
from what i understand, the One True Awk is one
of the slowest implementations (based on reading
a few years ago). i think Mawk is probably
“the best” implementation in terms of standards
and licenses and speed – but Arnold Robbins
really put a lot into gawk, and i think it is
faster than even Mawk in several critical ways
(though much bigger).
>> from what i understand, the One True Awk is one
>> of the slowest implementations (based on
>> reading a few years ago).
Where is the info? Last time I checked that One True Awk is a faster like few months ago (in 2003) on my own benchmark test. I learned it from the NetBSD mailing list[1].
[1] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-bugs/2002/07/03/0004.html
> As for the license, I would less care about it. Because, BSD will stuck with the third-party of
> GNU/GPL (possible more like) forever due to GCC, Binutils and etc. Therefore, the agreement of the
> BSD vs GPL license is 99% pointless and useless.
I disagree with that. The less non-free stuff DragonfFly uses, the better. Don’t forget that one of DragonFly’s goals is to be compiler-agnostic.
> I disagree with that. The less non-free stuff
> DragonfFly uses, the better.
Can you prove the point beside being more free? I doubt you can, since GPL apps don’t even get in conflict with the DragonFly kernel unless it’s module such as FS and etc.
> Don’t forget that one of DragonFly’s goals is to
> be compiler-agnostic.
I didn’t, I only give the example of GPL apps (include man, cvs and etc) that will be part of base system for the very long time.