"Eric Gillespie, Jr." wrote:

> Simon Burge <simonb@wasabisystems.com> writes:
> 
>     > If it's in /bin, it implies that you'll use it in single
>     > user mode.  If so, it has to be statically linked.  Once
> 
> I proposed putting it in /bin, so of course i need it in
> single-user and it will be statically linked.  I quoted the
> dynamic size because i figured that would be more useful.

That figure isn't useful if it doesn't represent the size of the binary
on an installed system.

>     > you start pulling in nameserver goo, static program size
>     > explodes...
> 
> Not so.  Statically linked, it's smaller than ls.
> 
> -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  297431 Sep 23 17:13 /bin/ls
> -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  224565 Oct  4 22:32 /bin/nc

You've compared it to what is on my system the 7th largest binary in
/bin.  nc would be the 10th largest binary, with another 22 that are
smaller.

>     > While I don't mean to sound too negative, I'm wondering
>     > what usefulness it provides over other tools already in the
>     > base system.
> 
> Clearly you haven't even bothered to look at what i've done.  No
> other tool in the base system does what nc does.

I did download your program and had a look at it.  It looks handy for
some circumstances, but _I_ personally don't see the need for it in
the base system.  Without examples, I can't see any advantage to using
nc over using ftp (and in fact anything I can think of seems harder
using nc since you need to actively set up something on the listener
side each time you want to use it).  If we started adding everyone's
favourite-but-in-their-eyes-most-necessary tool the installed system
size would become quite unreasonable very quickly.

That said, you've said you've volunteered to add the other netcat
features and it certainly looks like your program should replace the
current pkgsrc program by the same name when this can be done.

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
NetBSD CDs, Support and Service:    http://www.wasabisystems.com/