Re: [dev] Re: sbase

On 26 May 2011 07:39, Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> As for sbase I'm still sceptical this is a good idea as it
> re-implements perfectly sound 9base tools, but avoids the real tricky
> ones such as rc, mk or awk.

I, basically, disagree. The Plan 9 tools were written for another
operating system: ls has no -a flag, but you can use -q to list the 9P
QIDs? Fantastic. You can't distinguish between a failed match and an
error in grep, because Plan 9's exit returns a string? Even better.

No other utils that I have found are designed just to be simple and
hackable, with only a few useful flags, and not all the cruft. There's
9base, but all the benefits Plan 9 brings are totally screwed by the
marshalling back into Unix. Using P9P is a compromise, not an
alternative userspace.

-rwxr-xr-x 1 cls cls 604908 May 26 11:47 9base/cat/cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 cls cls 21268 May 26 11:47 sbase/cat

My intention is to build a userspace for Unix which is very simple
(see my earlier post), and actually *designed* for Unix, not just a
compatibility shim. I tend to prefer Unix tools which are actually,
you know, Unix tools.

Regarding awk, we should probably use bwk. I haven't decided what to
do about make or the shell, yet.

Thanks,
cls
Received on Thu May 26 2011 - 14:02:14 CEST