[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Fri Sep 15 07:35:35 AEST 2017


On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:39:05PM -0700, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> > 
> > Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
> > 
> 
> It's right there in the name "GNU" as well.  There's a whole generation
> of computer people out here for whom bash and gawk are fossilized in
> their substrata, and they get mad when someone suggests maybe other
> tools exist.

The use of "GNU" as in "GNU/Linux" is something that was pushed by
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and actively abosed, or
mostly ignored by the majority of the Linux community.  See [1] if you
want more details on that whole mess.  Of the distributions, I believe
only Debian has adopted the use of GNU/Linux in their official
documentation, but it's not used by most Debian users or developers
from my experience.

I'll also note that Debian has pushed to use /bin/dash, as their
default /bin/sh, and not /bin/bash, to try to make Debian's shell
scripts to be more portable.  (And for speed reasons, since dash is
faster than bash).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

				- Ted




More information about the TUHS mailing list