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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Could do all that, but FreeBSD could also have GNU make as the standard "make". I know there's some "license purity" reason why they don't want to do that, but don't expect everyone else to work around your self-imposed problem.

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GNU make is ported to FreeBSD and very frequently used to build ports that use GNU-isms in their Makefiles. It's a non-issue really.

> GNU make is ported to FreeBSD and very frequently used to build ports that use GNU-isms in their Makefiles. It's a non-issue really.

At least the OpenBSD developers hated the Linuxisms so much that they made a song "Aquarela do Linux!" to name and shame this:

> https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#52

No, GNU devs should understand Unix beyond the GNU ecosystem. I'd be retired on my private planet if I had gotten a dime each time I ported Linux software (mostly the build system) to work on non-linux unixoid operating system.

To be fair: Nothing in GNUiverse teaches you interoperability; I too learned it the hard way when switching from Linux to BSD.

GNU is literally a platform. If you want to run the software on another platform (particularly one which is not as widely used as GNU) then you have to port the software.

Or you have to write portable software.

isn't make older than gmake? it is normally gnu that adds extensions not compatible with the rest of the Unix world. making people believe sh == bash, make == gmake, m4 == gm4, and the list goes on for everything they touch.

But BSD make has extensions too. They're just different extensions.

“Embrace, extend, extinguish.”

Every Unix used to have its own implementation of those standard tools. They were often quite buggy and outdated (eg the C compiler that came with SunOS and Solaris in the mid 1990's only supported K&R syntax).

When installing Solaris, Sinix, AIX etc, you'd typically install the GNU tools immediately.

I understand the FreeBSD folks' frustration, though.

To be frank, many of the GNU extensions are very useful. BSD tools have their own extensions over POSIX as well. Anyway, GNU software is FOSS and tends to be portable and so you can create something like GNU/FreeBSD or GNU/OpenBSD or whatever (Debian did it in the past). Naturally, the GPL/LGPL/etc. may not be "free" enough for the tastes of the BSD devs, but this is getting into politics.

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