From owner-freebsd-current Sun Aug 12 11:19:30 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from avocet.mail.pas.earthlink.net (avocet.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.121.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B6A8E37B43F for ; Sun, 12 Aug 2001 11:19:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert2@mindspring.com) Received: from mindspring.com (dialup-209.245.141.62.Dial1.SanJose1.Level3.net [209.245.141.62]) by avocet.mail.pas.earthlink.net (EL-8_9_3_3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA02576; Sun, 12 Aug 2001 11:19:10 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <3B76C8C6.D7C0D639@mindspring.com> Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 11:19:50 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Reply-To: tlambert2@mindspring.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jens Schweikhardt Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: bash in /usr/local/bin? References: <3B74D180.D036D629@hway.net> <3B75D33D.68368F22@softweyr.com> <3B764D47.6060902@yahoo.com> <3B76555B.891321BF@mindspring.com> <20010812125329.A1111@schweikhardt.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jens Schweikhardt wrote: > # Bash has a license which precludes its inclusion as part > # of the base system. > > [Not that I favor more shells on the root file system, but anyway:] > What about gcc and grep? Does the license differ or are these not regarded > being part of the base system? We would get rid of them if we could. We keep their source code in a ghetto, since we can't. Any company wanting to get rid of all GPL'ed and other restrictively licensed code in a FreeBSD based binary distribution can simply dike the ghetto out of the build tree, and build a still usable system binary from it, with no restrictively licensed code. Changing grep and tar was an incredibly bad decision. It has the distinction that the old, free code is there in the Attic, and can be recovered, if need be. What's in the base system comes down to "What's BSD? What's not? What's UNIX? What's not?". A BSD system is a UNIX system with BSD features... so it has the Bourne shell, and it has a csh, and it has BSD make, etc.. It also has a C compiler. The compromise for the inveterate bash user is to make it available as a port or a package, not installed by default. > If we ever put another shell besides /bin/sh on the root file > system (and I doubt it very much) there's always zsh with as > far as I can tell a two clause BSD license. With almost all > bash features and then some :-) The other consideration is image bloat. Many of us were very unhappy about the inclusion of perl in the base system; it added bloat, and now people are writing perl scripts instead of sh scripts, which is arguably very against the original UNIX philosopy of having a small set of tiny, very specific tools, which could be strung together to do any general job that needed doing. Likewise, bash encourages bad programming practices, which are against the UNIX philosophy: there are people out there who write shell scripts which will only run under bash: they do not distinguish between standard Bourne shell features, and bash extensions. This results in code, particularly from the Linux crowd, where bash _is_ /bin/sh, where the shell scripts start with "#!/bin/sh", but, in fact, will not run on every "/bin/sh" in existance. It's hard to discourage that, when you implicitly condone it... I can't imagine a bash user not wanting to: cd /bin mv sh sh.old ln bash sh if they could... then, all of the sudden, we start growing a bunch of bash-ism's in /etc/rc* ("works on my machine"), and we are now dependent on restrictively licensed code in the base system. That benefits no one. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message