Re: Official request: Please make GNU grep the default

My $0.02 may not be worth much, but ...

On Aug 14, 2010, at 9:55 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
> I was hoping to avoid commenting on this, but my feeling (and I  
> would be glad to be wrong about it) from reading the responses is  
> that there is a fair degree of knee-jerk reaction to what seems to  
> be "There's big bad dougb picking on some poor innocent developer  
> again!" going on here; and criticizing MY development skills either  
> A) makes you feel better, B) makes you think that you're dishing out  
> to me a little of what you think I'm dishing out to Gabor, or both.  
> Well fine, hope you're feeling good about yourself, and you made me  
> feel really small and bad. Good on you.
>
> Meanwhile, substitute my stupid way of doing things and defective  
> programming skills for any other workload of your choice. Are you  
> really going to tell me you've never had to grep a 20,000 line file?  
> Are you really going to tell me that you've never had to grep  
> something the size of the FreeBSD source and/or ports trees for all  
> the instances of $FOO? And you didn't answer either of the questions  
> I had in the post you responded to, so let me make it easier for you.
>
> Our default grep should be significantly slower than the old grep  
> because:
>
> I think that new grep which is ____ times slower than the old grep  
> is still in the acceptable range.
>
>
> Doug


Why not perform a run or two with portmaster and bsdgrep with  
profiling, and send Gabor those results?  It would certainly help  
pinpoint the slowdown, and you would have something to point to to say  
"X in bsdgrep is slow, so we should switch back to GNU grep until  
that's fixed" rather than just "bsdgrep is slow, fix it".  Like most  
people here, I agree that such a performance difference is rather  
unacceptable for a production system, but since this is -current,  
fixing the performance issue should be done rather than casting the  
whole thing aside until it's up to par.

There are 28 messages in this thread already, with no consensus in  
sight.

- Justin