GNU replacement tools

pfr

Thanks for all the replies. I have no real gripe with GNU, but I guess it was just curiosity as I was looking at both Alpine & Oasis which are both interesting projects.

I'll give up my quest on this one I suppose 😆

Jay

pfr never give up. My dream is to be Hokage 😜

rvp

pfr I'll give up my quest on this one I suppose

I should've been more careful in my initial reading of this. I assumed you meant. "What can we do to rid NetBSD of all GNU stuff", when I should've read it as: "What can I do to get rid of the GNU on my machine". In which case, it's not that quixotic of a quest. Taking @nia's list, there are replacements possible:

grep: plenty of performant replacements written in Rust on github. (not sure if they take the same switches, etc.)
gettest: purge
texinfo: purge
groff: purge (most docs already come with the plain-text and .ps versions)
cvs/rcs: ??? (only of interest to developers)
binutils: use clang tools? (ld.lld, llvm-ar, ...) ( " )
gcc: clang, pcc ( " )

nia

It actually isn't possible to build the linux kernel with clang IIRC, reliably. So gnu-free linux is some way off from a toolchain perspective, but most Linux distributions don't ship a toolchain as a core part of the OS like the BSDs do (and like POSIX specifies).

nia Nearly, https://lwn.net/Articles/734071/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMQrnVDf-rY

neubaer

nia I've been building my own Linux kernel with clang for some time now. These days it's as easy as passing USE_LLVM=1 to make. (That uses the whole LLVM toolchain actually.)

pfr

rvp I should've been more careful in my initial reading of this. I assumed you meant. "What can we do to rid NetBSD of all GNU stuff", when I should've read it as: "What can I do to get rid of the GNU on my machine".

This is what I meant, yes.

While not anywhere near as feature ritch as sed or awk, I've been fond of sd as a simple find & replace tool.

rvp groff: purge (most docs already come with the plain-text and .ps versions)

I quite like using groff, in fact I've used it to write several documents recently, including my resume.
I've been looking at neatroff as a replacement.

rvp

pfr I quite like using groff, in fact I've used it to write several documents recently, including my resume.

Colour me impressed! Macro package or straight troff?

pfr

rvp Mostly the groff_ms macro package. I haven't really learned how to use bare-bones troff just yet.

tcmart14

Sound like what you are looking for is something like BusyBox maybe? Is it the GPL you want to avoid, or GNU as in the umbrella of GNU software actually from GNU?

pfr

I'm just curious to see what BSD looks like without any GNU software. Kind of like the aforementioned Linux distributions that are GNU free.

rvp

pfr Kind of like the aforementioned Linux distributions that are GNU free.

GNU-free Linux---Hmm, wonder what they do about that pesky GPL'ed kernel, though...

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