Netcat on Fedora is a different Netcat

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Giuseppe Fuggiano
<giuseppe.fuggiano at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi list.
>
> I recently installed Fedora and today I got a little time after work
> to configure it on my laptop.  The first thing I did was configure the
> network to access to the internet and to my LAN at home.  To test the
> connection I used netcat to listen to a dummy port, as I usually do.
> The thing I discovered is that nc on Fedora has a different manpage, a
> different binary and almost different syntax.

Fedora's package uses the nc codebase from openBSD.
rpm -qi nc

We package things with the upstream project url encoded in the header
information so you know exactly where the sourcecode base is coming
from in our packages.  Do the other distributions you use do they
same? Do you know where the upstream source distribution of their
netcat package is?

Is there another actively maintained netcat upstream project codebase
that you were expecting to find?  My understanding is that that the
netcat 1.10 version that some other distros ship..is a dead upstream
project.  If I'm mistaken, please let me know where it is.

rpm -q --changelog nc
and you find this:

* Thu Mar 31 2005 Radek Vokal <rvokal at redhat.com> 1.77-1
- switching to new OpenBSD version of netcat

The switch to OpenBSD's actively maintained netcat codebase was made
in March 2005.

>
> Why?!
>
> On every other distribution nc is the same and has the same syntax.

Because we think its appropriate to track upstream project releases as
much as is reasonable.  Holding netcat at an old release version for
cross 'linux' distro compatibility isn't necessarily inline with that,
neither is holding onto codebases with a dead codebase for several
years when there is an alternative and active upstream to migrate to.

-jef