[gentoo-dev] Discussion: alternative compatible utilities

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

As Gentoo/FreeBSD proceeds, I'm trying to abstract as much as I can the 
underlying userland.
Thinking of Gentoo/FreeBSD just as a starting point for other porting of 
Gentoo's framework on different operating systems (for example the 
already-work-in-progress Gentoo/Darwin, the I-don't-know-how's-doing 
Gentoo/OpenBSD, and the maybe-someone-will-work-on Gentoo/NetBSD), there's 
something I'd really like to see: alternatives for system utilities.

Let me explain: on Gentoo/Linux systems, all the base utilities (make, tar, 
sed, etc etc) are GNUish; on Gentoo/FreeBSD they are BSDish; on Gentoo/Darwin 
I don't really know :P
This limits a bit the user because to use other kind of utilities it must use 
aliases and he can't change, for example, the tar used by portage or by other 
scripts.

As eselect's work is proceeding it can be interesting having a way to have the 
base utils install with a prefix (g for GNU stuff, bsd for BSD stuff, 
eventually fbsd/obsd/nbsd if they are different) and then having a link to 
the basename which acn be changed with eselect.
Most of the scripts which needs a specific syntax (usually GNU syntax) already 
checks for prefixed executables like gmake, gsed and so on, but the main 
problem is with portage (think of all the make DESTDIR="${D} install stuff), 
also if emake is fixed and sed stuff is as compatible as possible.

Having to provide compatibility with such a framework is quite difficult at 
this point because many ebuilds does depend on GNU syntax also if not clearly 
stated, but I hope this can be fixed step-by-step using g-prefixed commands 
(after making sure that all systems will have g-prefixed commands).
It's not like something is going to happen soon, but maybe in the future this 
can be a good way to make sure we expand the abiliy of users to select what 
they really want.

Comments, ideas, and everythign else is welcome, it's a discussion after all.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Gentoo Developer (Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Gentoo/AMD64)

http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/