On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Matthew Orgass wrote:

: > There are some things that a typical modern Unixlike OS usually has as
: > OS-maintained components, and usually (but not always) because the
: > components have little "outside" maintenance.  You have the Bourne shell
: > (and C shell), the usual shell utilities, at least one mail agent, a
: > compiler/development toolchain, a printing subsystem, IP-based utilities,
: > and a manpage formatter.
: 
:   Right, but NetBSD does not actually maintain all of these things.  Just
: because NetBSD does not maintain grep does not mean it does not belong in
: the base system.

:   However, the fact that grep is not maintained by NetBSD does mean that
: it should not be in the NetBSD CVS tree.  Instead, it should be referenced
: in the ususal pkgsrc manner with patches.

Although grep is a fairly common, and quite historic, shell tool of Unixlike
OS's, and scripts and users expect it to be present.  The reason we happen
to use the GNU one is because we've used it for a while as a path to *less*
maintenance cost.  I actually had a conversation with someone about possibly
replacing it, now that we have a getopt_long() to provide compatibility with
the gnu long options....

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  http://www.wasabisystems.com/
-- Speed, stability, security, and support.  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.