Re: Proposal: remove usr.bin/mkstr

[Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>]

Am 11.04.2022 um 03:05 schrieb Robert Elz:
>    | It costs disk space and build time.
>
> That's not worthy of comment.
>
>    | for something without positive value,
>
> That's just opinion.   That's my point.   We cannot know what doesn't
> have value.  We know what we personally use, if we were to each treat
> everything that we don't use, and cannot imagine wanting to use, as
> being without positive value, and retired it, there'd soon be very
> little left.

In general, your argument may hold. But in this specific case, the
manual page of mkstr(1) has been saying for 29 years now that the tool
is basically useless.

Even though I have never used bthset(1), I guess it has some value and I
would never propose to remove it from NetBSD. But in the case of
mkstr(1), things are very different. This tool is useless, it messes up
every program that calls perror("string literal") or yyerror("string").

I still don't see any point in keeping it. It just makes every binary
distribution larger than necessary. Granted, only by a small amount, but
still. We also don't keep and distribute old versions of GCC, just in
case someone relies on some bug in it that has been fixed in a later
version.

Roland