Re: Port of OpenBSD's sdiff

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007, Stanislav Sedov wrote:

>> these are very good news! You might also want to take a look at 
>> textproc/bsddiff, textproc/bsdgrep and textproc/bsdsort. These are the 
>> BSD-licensed text processing tools from OpenBSD, as well, but I haven't 
>> looked at sdiff, yet, thus I can only tell about the former 3 ones. If we 
>> change to those, we should make sure, that they are compatible with the GNU 
>> versions as much as they can be. Thus we might need a bit of feature 
>> completion there. For example, we should check if the long command line 
>> options are available there, too. For diff, grep and sort, there are some 
>> of those, but they are undocumented in the manual page, so we have to 
>> complete the manpages, too. Now I'm busy with SoC and other high priority 
>> tasks, but if I have some time, I'll take a look as I'm also interested in 
>> getting these completed.
>>
>
> Personally, I see no point in adding -- style options, since the entire our 
> world build without them. GNU people can always install gnu- ports, we just 
> should insure they're posix compatible.
>
> Furthermore, having -- and - style options in one world effectively broke 
> BSD's perfect look and feel:-)

On the other hand -- intentionally breaking scripts that have worked with 
FreeBSD for years isn't exactly the best way to make end-users happy.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge