At Wed, 25 Feb 2004 23:02:48 +0000 (UTC), Stephen Hahn <stephen.hahn@s-u-n.c-o-m> writes:

>> In practice GNU sort runs rings around Solaris sort. I don't know why
>> Sun doesn't switch to GNU sort as the default. It'd be better for
>> everybody concerned.
>
> I think "rings" is a little strong today;

Yes, you're probably right. Sorry, I guess that I hadn't tried
Solaris "sort" recently. I installed the latest "sort" patch for
Solaris 9 (114363-02, dated January 27). It does seem to spruce up
Solaris "sort" so that it's quite competitive, even in ASCII locales.
Well done. (Perhaps this'll prod me to shake loose some spare time
for GNU sort to make it run faster again. :-)

I wish that we wouldn't need to have two different people doing
essentially the same thing. A sure waste of effort in my opinion.
Perhaps you can talk your management into GPL'ing Solaris sort?
I'm not entirely joking here.

> I would certainly concede it for 5.6 and 5.7, where our approach
> to internationalization was *ahem* naive.

GNU sort is still pretty naive about i18n, I'm afraid. Most serious
sorters use the C locale for big stuff anyway, so there hasn't been
much motivation to speed it up.

> At one point, Solaris sort was the only choice if you wanted to
> sort in locales where ASCII order is not correct; GNU sort may now
> collate appropriately in such locales.

It does try to. (No doubt there are bugs. Isn't i18n wonderful? :-)

In article <7wy8qpt791.fsf@sic.twinsun.com>,
Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> wrote:

>I wish that we wouldn't need to have two different people doing
>essentially the same thing. A sure waste of effort in my opinion.
>Perhaps you can talk your management into GPL'ing Solaris sort?
>I'm not entirely joking here.

I doubt that this would help.....

Let us compare with another project:

I published star under GPL in may 1995, this is now 9 years ago.
GNU tar still exists and people put effort into GNU tar.

I suspect that RMS has mental problems with withdrawing GNU tar
in favor of star and I am sure the same will happen for sort.

--
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At 27 Feb 2004 11:54:18 GMT, js@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:

> I suspect that RMS has mental problems with withdrawing GNU tar

In English, the phrase "mental problems" connotes some degree of
insanity. I suspect that you didn't intend that, and that you
intended to say only that the problems with adopting star were all in
RMS's mind. If I recall correctly, though, there were some other
issues as well; it wasn't an issue of RMS's unexplainable fondness for
the old crufty code in GNU tar.

At any rate, I doubt whether any of those GNU tar issues would arise
if Sun wanted to donate its performance improvements to GNU sort.

In article <c1nb5a$el8$1@news.cs.tu-berlin.de>,
Joerg Schilling <js@cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:
>In article <7wy8qpt791.fsf@sic.twinsun.com>,
>Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> wrote:
>
>>I wish that we wouldn't need to have two different people doing
>>essentially the same thing. A sure waste of effort in my opinion.
>>Perhaps you can talk your management into GPL'ing Solaris sort?
>>I'm not entirely joking here.
>
>I doubt that this would help.....
>
>Let us compare with another project:
>
>I published star under GPL in may 1995, this is now 9 years ago.
>GNU tar still exists and people put effort into GNU tar.
>
>I suspect that RMS has mental problems with withdrawing GNU tar
>in favor of star <snip>

Maybe it's all out of date now, but at least at one
time star didn't "100% dominate" tar (gnu or sun) -- there
were *some* things for which star had problems not
experienced by gnu-tar or perhaps sun-tar, I think.

Nor did gnu-tar "100% dominate" sun-tar -- there were one
or two situations that gnu-tar couldn't handle, I think.

If anyone knows the current situation, pros and cons,
among these three "tars", I guess it'd be you.

Just what *is* the current situation. Could one
simply choose either gnu-tar or star, discard the other
*forever*, and *never* wish that "forever" wasn't
quite so long?

Or chose just star -- and *never* regret not being
able to use any other tar-like program?

(This really is an important subject -- before I
chose my eyes, hold my nose, and jump off the high-board!)

Thanks!

David

At Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:19:34 +0000 (UTC), dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) writes:

> Just what *is* the current situation [with GNU tar and star].

Both programs are under active development. The CVS repository for
GNU tar is at <http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/tar>. The star alpha
versions are at <ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/alpha/>.

> Could one simply choose either gnu-tar or star, discard the other
> *forever*, and *never* wish that "forever" wasn't quite so long?

Opinions differ. (If everybody agreed, we wouldn't have two programs
now, would we? :-)

In article <7wy8qoqnoe.fsf@sic.twinsun.com>,
Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> wrote:
>At 27 Feb 2004 11:54:18 GMT, js@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:
>
>> I suspect that RMS has mental problems with withdrawing GNU tar
>
>In English, the phrase "mental problems" connotes some degree of
>insanity. I suspect that you didn't intend that, and that you
>intended to say only that the problems with adopting star were all in
>RMS's mind. If I recall correctly, though, there were some other
>issues as well; it wasn't an issue of RMS's unexplainable fondness for
>the old crufty code in GNU tar.

I remember only one issue that has been discussed more deeply.

It seems that the FSF insists in getting the Copyright transfered
to FSF. Note that this is illegal in Europe and forbidden by law.
I am sure that Sun would never go along with that for sort.

Other issues have not been addressed directly. It seems that there
have also been resentements because I provide a man page and because I use
a build system that is predominant to the system that is usually
used by FSF software.


>At any rate, I doubt whether any of those GNU tar issues would arise
>if Sun wanted to donate its performance improvements to GNU sort.


See above: at least the biggest problem that FSF likes the Copyrights
being transfered if they switch to other peoples software in favor of
software they currently publish seems to apply.


--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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In article <c1ppvm$rqb$1@reader2.panix.com>,
David Combs <dkcombs@panix.com> wrote:

>>I suspect that RMS has mental problems with withdrawing GNU tar
>>in favor of star <snip>
>
>Maybe it's all out of date now, but at least at one
>time star didn't "100% dominate" tar (gnu or sun) -- there

I am not sure if you use the word "dominate" correctly or
if you really mean "dominate over" or "outclass".

>were *some* things for which star had problems not
>experienced by gnu-tar or perhaps sun-tar, I think.

Do you really know things that star has problems but GNU tar has not?

The GNU tar documentation states that it has some features that star
has not. If you look closer that them, you will find that these features
are either not really needed or just implemented in GNU tar in a buggy
way so you don't really like to use them.

On the other side, star has many features I use every day that GNU tar is
missing.

>If anyone knows the current situation, pros and cons,
>among these three "tars", I guess it'd be you.
>
>Just what *is* the current situation. Could one
>simply choose either gnu-tar or star, discard the other
>*forever*, and *never* wish that "forever" wasn't
>quite so long?

I never did miss GNU tar or any of the GNU tar specific features.
I would have real problems with my everyday's work if I was forced to
use GNU tar or Sun's instead of star.


>Or chose just star -- and *never* regret not being
>able to use any other tar-like program?

If you know ompirtant features that are missing in star, name them.

--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
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At 29 Feb 2004 13:33:11 GMT, js@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:

> It seems that the FSF insists in getting the Copyright transfered
> to FSF. Note that this is illegal in Europe and forbidden by law.
> I am sure that Sun would never go along with that for sort.

Legally speaking, this is incorrect. Companies like Sun assign
copyright to the FSF all the time. IBM has done it on several
occasion. And IBM has quite good lawyers (as SCO is finding out the
hard way :-).

I don't think we need to address your other points; they're sheer
speculation on your part, and anyway they're irrelevant to the issue
of 'sort'.

[Paul Eggert]:
>
> At 29 Feb 2004 13:33:11 GMT, js@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:
>
> > It seems that the FSF insists in getting the Copyright
> > transfered to FSF. Note that this is illegal in Europe and
> > forbidden by law. I am sure that Sun would never go along with
> > that for sort.
>
> Legally speaking, this is incorrect. Companies like Sun assign
> copyright to the FSF all the time. IBM has done it on several
> occasion. And IBM has quite good lawyers (as SCO is finding out
> the hard way :-).

these are all American companies.

I would amend the use of "illegal" and "forbidden" to "invalid",
though. I signed FSF's papers, there was no reason not to -- it made
them happy, and it had no legal consequences for me.
--
Kjetil T. (Norwegian resident)

In article <7w1xodxhq2.fsf@sic.twinsun.com>,
Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> wrote:
>At 29 Feb 2004 13:33:11 GMT, js@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) writes:
>
>> It seems that the FSF insists in getting the Copyright transfered
>> to FSF. Note that this is illegal in Europe and forbidden by law.
>> I am sure that Sun would never go along with that for sort.
>
>Legally speaking, this is incorrect. Companies like Sun assign
>copyright to the FSF all the time. IBM has done it on several
>occasion. And IBM has quite good lawyers (as SCO is finding out the
>hard way :-).

Well OK, it definitely _is_ illegal in europe and if the FSF
is not clever enough to understand that the world is more than just
the USA, then they are a bit off the way.

NOTE that I made a proposal to the FSF that they would be allowed
to _add_ a note to their usage and distribution rights which has not been
accepted by FSF. It seems that FSF does not like the best solution for
the users but the best solution for FSF.


>I don't think we need to address your other points; they're sheer
>speculation on your part, and anyway they're irrelevant to the issue
>of 'sort'.

Speculations usually start if discussions are not done in an open way
and if a discussion partner (the FSF) suddenly stops the communiation
without giving a reason, people definitely start to speculate.

--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
URL: http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily