Re: [OFFTOPIC] Gnumenclature was Re: IBM, was never Re: Linux Kernel

Damien Miller (dmiller@ilogic.com.au)
Tue, 5 Jan 1999 20:34:09 +1100 (EST)


On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Larry McVoy wrote:

> "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery@kf8nh.apk.net>:
> : Yes, but those also happen to non-Linux systems, and I have
> : to work with a lot of those. So I deal with them using
> : non-Linux-specific methods --- thus, a distribution identifier
> : does nothing useful.
>
> That's really great that you have it all figured out. However, there
> are people who actually use config.guess for it's intended purpose -
> as an installation/configuration aid. Given that purpose, why is it
> so hard for you to understand that:
>
> *-redhat-linux
> *-suse-linux
> *-debian-linux
> *-caldera-linux
> etc
>
> is far more useful than
>
> *-gnu-linux
>
> What's so darned hard about following that logic?

Perhaps it is because Linux vendors are trying to make their
distributions more compatible (through projects such as the LSB) and
such a naming convention would only serve to drive them further apart.

The distributions are not that different anyway, compared to the
various flavours of BSD, which I presume the Vendor field was intended
to distinguish between.

Think of a new user's confusion as (s)he attempts to use a
system where some of the packages report *-redhat-linux and
others *-debian-linux?

Regards,
Damien Miller

--
| "Bombay is 250ms from New York in the new world order" - Alan Cox
| Damien Miller - http://www.ilogic.com.au/~dmiller

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