that old GNU/Linux argument
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Jul 20 19:36:27 UTC 2008
Björn Persson wrote:
>> Linux has always been just a kernel. But what you usually describe is a
>> complete distribution.
>
> And when you talk about a complete distribution, do you call it "Linux" or do
> you call it "Fedora" or "CentOS" or "Slackware"?
Generally "CentOS", since for the reasons I might have to talk about it,
the distribution infrastructure and specific content choices are
important, although I might mention "Fedora" to contrast the infrastructure.
> The application I work on in my job uses some Linux-specific features and some
> GNU-specific ones. It wouldn't be nearly as good if we'd use only POSIX
> interfaces. We could probably port it to one of the BSDs for example, and we
> might achieve similar performance there, but currently it requires GNU and
> Linux so it could be described as a GNU/Linux application.
The only GNU-specific features that come to the top of my head are the
-a option to cp (and I usually use rsync anyway where it would be
useful) and the copious non-standard options to gnutar that sometimes
turn out to be useful. Are there others that really matter? It would
be nice to have a list to avoid in portable code and scripts.
> But sometimes I want to say something about all distributions that are based
> on GNU and Linux. Then I call them "GNU/Linux-based distributions". If I
> wanted to include Debian GNU/Hurd and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD too, but not
> FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD, then I'd say "GNU-based distributions".
If you aren't distributing copies and thus having to pay attention to
the associated source distribution obligation imposed by the GNU/GPL
components there should be little reason to know or care about that
layer of infrastructure or whether it has original unix roots or a bsd
or gnu flavored clone.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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