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Comment by Annatar | Hacker News Reader

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"Those of us who used such programs, either from GNU or from other, similarly freely licensed software, knew that we were using high-quality code."

I don't know whether to call this nonsense, lies, or both. I'll go for both. In the real UNIX(R) circles, GNU is notorious for being horribly hacked-together software. For example GNU tar implements decompression, or GNU grep implements recursive searching, something handled by find(1) and xargs(1) on a real UNIX, the modular way. GNU always implemented tools within tools, breaking modularity and teaching an entire generation how to use a UNIX-like system wrong, according to the "works on my machine!" principle. Now we have an entire generation which grew up on GNU, brainwashed into oblivion thinking GNU is the pinnacle of high quality software. I'm disgusted to no end.

If you want high quality software, go for one of the illumos-based distributions, which is a true, SVR 4.0 open source UNIX, written by engineers with formal education in computer science instead of amateurs who think they know how UNIX is supposed to work. There's really no replacement for the real thing.

> In the real UNIX(R) circles

Real UNIX(R) sucked. Those who had to use it, were glad, if they could install the GNU utilities. Compared to the vendor supplied tools, they were high quality, and without the arbitrary limitations that the supplied tools had. There are earned lessons from these real UNIX(r) behind some rules in the GNU Coding standards.

"Compared to the vendor supplied tools, they were high quality, and without the arbitrary limitations that the supplied tools had."

I've been using both GNU and SVR4 tools for almost 30 years and GNU tools are horrible, even worse than horrible when compared to SVR4. Which limitations?

The vendor utils assumed limits on data they processed (max file size, max line lenght, etc). If you ran over them, you wouldn't either get the correct results, or it died, or something else happened. That's the reason behind the section of 4.2 Writing robust programs.

One of the other things is a rapid slownown and allocating too much memory. For example, when using Sun's grep and hitting a binary file, now you could wait hours for the result. It didn't help, that some Sun applications did put binary files into /etc, so in the end, you couldn't grep /etc. Well, not until you installed the GNU version, which didn't have that problem.

That is utter nonsense what you write: these were bugs in earnest, which got fixed 20 years ago! You obviously haven't used a modern SVR4, illumos-based UNIX.

Nothing beats personal experience. The last Sun I've used was Blade 100, which is almost 20 years ago, indeed. At that time, GNU tools were vastly superior.

It also happens to be time, since when the Real Unix(R) is dead. Yes, there is an occasional zombie, but that doesn't change the point. So they caught up with GNU? Who cares today?

Anybody who wants simple, robust, bare metal performance containers: provisioning lasts a few seconds and is dead simple. Unlike the cgroups mess, one gets a full blown UNIX server running at the speed of bare metal, and it can run GNU/Linux distributions at the speed of bare metal as well. It's superior cloud technology, superior to any GNU/Linux solution, by several light years.

Can confirm. My first job out of college was building out a compatibility layer across some 14 variants of UNIX. Hopping between boxes involved an uncomfortable amount of time waiting for nroff to render your man page because common options to common commands were decidedly uncommon .

SVR UNIXes like HP-UX, Solaris and IRIX were very consistent (I used all three of them simultaneously): if one understood SVR4, one could move between those three seamlessly.

DEC UNIX, OSF/1 and Ultrix were a variation of BSD. If one knew that, there was no problem either.

No comment on AIX, since my brush-ins with it were far too short to be able to claim anything.

What else was there? 14 is a large number when it comes to operating systems.

DEC UNIX and OSF/1 (and Tru64) is the same OS, just different releases.

I know that, since I used all three of them.

I mean I get there is an argument to be had about GNU tools breaking some pure UNIX code (which is mostly a vaporware)..... what’s beyond deranged is to hold System V up as some kind of uberalles... like where to begin? IPC? Mandatory locking? Unix true or not has been a bundle of hacks for years.

When was the last time you worked on a true UNIX subsystem source? Have you looked at illumos code?

The fact that you conflate 'UNIX' with 'computer science' as if those things are at all equivalent is enough to dismiss this comment outright. Let me guess, Windows is just a hack job too? If only Microsoft hired people with real computer science degrees.... /s

GNU's success speaks for itself.

How did you draw the conclusion that I conflate UNIX and computer science?

UNIX was developed by computer scientists with formal education in computing theory and algorithms, on top of those people inventing some of the algorithms and data structures which are still taught in formal computer science today, and for a good reason. Then the work was taken up by engineers with formal education in the same. But how is that conflating an operating environment (not even an operating system, but an operating environment) with computer science? What the hell...

The success of GNU is built on ignorance -- then-teenagers fresh out of high school downloading ISO's on their P.C. buckets because they didn't even know there is such a thing as a UNIX workstation, or thinking they couldn't afford one (which wasn't true, as older systems could be had for a bargain). They could have just as easily downloaded NetBSD or FreeBSD but didn't because they didn't know any better. Even today the entire hype is based on not knowing any better (why are we still running Linux, eh?) That's not something to be proud of, but I suppose it does "speak for itself" in a way.

Your complaint about GNU was that it departed from the UNIX philosophy of one tool doing one thing, and then contrasted that philosophy with what 'real' computer scientists do. Last I checked, there is no 'rule' in computer science that tools must do one thing.

GNU is not Unix, as the name so clearly articulates, so other than your seeming complaint that 'real' computer scientists always write Unix-style utilities, I'm not sure how your criticism of GNU tools doing more than one thing is at all relevant.

FreeBSD was released in 1993, and NetBSD in the same year. BSD as a whole only went from a proprietary distribtuion to open source in that year. GNU was started in 1983, thus making even that criticism of GNU completely unfounded.

Ignorance or not, the success of GNU (such as supplying the C compiler used in your BSD darlings) was put into place by people in their 20s-40s mostly. Long before any high schooler could afford a CD burner let alone wait to download an ISO. The most prolific GNU contributors have CS backgrounds from backwaters institutions like MIT, CMU and Stanford and we’re pushing greybeard status in the 90s. Your narrative is based on pure make believe.

Redhat, SUSE, and IBM... bash them all you want, are not high school side projects.

> In the real UNIX(R) circles

is this a meme ?

More of a historical quirk than anything else. IIRC, the commercial UNIXes were descended from the original Bell Labs code. Linux is a independently developed clone of UNIX and was so primitive in the era where commercial UNIXes were dominant that more than a few old-timers look down their nose at Linux as "not a real UNIX".

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4091/is-linux-a-uni...

GNU/Linux operating sytstems are still very primitive (and very broken) by UNIX standards, especially by SVR4 standards.

For example, things like fault management architecture, correctly implemented NFS V3 and V4, or correctly working fiberchannel stack are science fiction on GNU/Linux.

What the hell? Which meme? UNIX(R) is a registered trademark.

... yes, which almost no one cares about anymore. Linux and GNU have won, get over it. Even on BSD systems installing GNU tools is the only way to stay sane.

That's just nonsense propaganda. As for me, I will rather never touch a computer again than accept that GNU/Linux garbage.

I work on GNU/Linux intensely every single day. The more I use it, the more I hate it.

It's amateurishly hacked-together vomit. I will never accept it.

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