Re: Official request: Please make GNU grep the default

On 15 August 2010 02:45, Doug Barton <dougb_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> Ivan,
>
> I know that you mean this at least semi-humorously, however I'm going to
> provide a dead-serious reply below.

Thank you for your level-headed response - it's actually better than
continuing less seriously or explosively :) Also, sorry for
redirecting your thread but it provides me context.

> Again, partial agreement. One of the reasons I resisted INDEX support
> for so long was that my original idea of it was to do exactly what you
> suggest here, parse it once then look up the data internally. However
> even though I _can_ do this in shell it actually makes the performance
> worse since now I've got his huge memory footprint to pass around every
> time portmaster calls itself recursively (which for those who don't know
> is portmaster's entire model of operation).

This is my long-term point - it really would be beneficial to have an
alternative, richer language in base which would fall between the
categories of "a good system language but far too complex for simple
string-parsing stuff" which is C and "a good glue language for system
utilities but lacking more evolved concepts" which is shell.

[skip the following section, I was going deep into wishful thinking territory]

That said, I know it's useless to simply import something in the hope
it will be useful in the future. My best bet is that I (or someone
else) would write something useful enough to be imported in base in
such a language, which would warrant importing the language itself. I
also know that perl was there and was removed because of maintainance
problems and clashing between user expecting it to be from ports and
having an old version in base, so this potential new language will
have to not clash with ports and not be used by installed ports by
default. My current favorite is lua because it's very small and easily
embeddable and extendable by C code, but there are others - some
JavaScript engines probably fit the description.

> BUT, none of that is germane to my actual argument. I was very careful
> to NOT say, "BSD grep is slow, which screws up portmaster, so the
> default has to change." What I said was, "BSD grep is anywhere from 6 to
> 15 TIMES slower than GNU grep in all cases, so the default needs to
> change."

Yes, and I agree - having new grep which is about an order of
magnitude slower then the old one is a bad situation.