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Comment by gnud | Hacker News Reader

This is a very good initiative. But linking "GNUisms" to the communist party website is just dumb.

It might be unprofessional in this context, but it did make me smile. The GNU project's political dedication is vital to the OSS world, but quality of code, documentation and usability often do feel like an afterthought. The minimalism of the BSDs, for example, always is a refreshing contrast.

(Don't get me wrong, I don't want to flame, I use GNU tools on a daily basis. Just when you know what they mean, the rather unexpected link is pretty funny.)

GNU tools are rather well documented and well usable. I really don't understand the claims you are making.

It starts with this:

  The full documentation for XY is maintained as a Texinfo  manual. If
  the info and XY programs are properly installed at your site, the command
  
          info coreutils 'XY invocation'
  
  should give you access to the complete manual.

No, I don't want to spend days learning how to use yet another obscure hypertext browser. That's not the Unix way anyway. GNU's Not Unix, and that's fine - but annoying at times.

Yeah, I'm not criticising it, but I expected an actual example .

Off the top of my head: __compar_fn_t (just a typedef), strndupa(), parse_printf_format(), canonicalize_file_name(), the GLOB_BRACE flag, implicitly included headers, error.h (also in uClibc)...

We have notes in our Bitbucket source.

you must be a laugh riot at parties

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