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List:       debian-devel
Subject:    Re: but I want the GNU versions of packages
From:       Mike Fedyk <mfedyk () matchmail ! com>
Date:       2003-07-15 21:46:17
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On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 01:58:54PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 09:31:39AM +0200, Roland Mas wrote:
> > Dan Jacobson (2003-06-28 07:57:55 +0800) :
> > > Gentlemen, after I installed "Debian GNU/Linux", I found I had to
> > > take extra steps to get the GNU version of a program installed, as
> > > some other leading brand alternative was in its stead.
> > >
> > > So what is the single command to apt-get install all the GNU
> > > versions of everything?
> > 
> > I humbly suggest "apt-get install task-gnu-only".  Of course, someone
> > will have to make and maintain that task package, but once done, there
> > you are.  Or you could start a Debian-GNU-Only subproject.
> 
> One question: what's the point? Surely you want the best, not
> necessarily the GNU version (which might be an incredibly bleeding-edge
> pre-alpha thing, like for example mailutils was not so long ago)?

good point.

Though I wonder why 

Package: mawk
Priority: required

Package: gawk
Priority: optional

I know for sure that in this instance gawk indcludes all of the features
mawk does and many more.  

Maybe the reason is the pachage size?

Package: mawk
Installed-Size: 220

Package: gawk
Installed-Size: 1808

That might be it.

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         216K Jun  5 16:47 /usr/bin/gawk
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          85K May 30 07:27 /usr/bin/mawk

If you split up the gawk package into gawk-doc and gawk-locales then the
gawk package would probably only be 100k larger than mawk.

I went to a UUG (Unix User Group), that had a presentation on awk, and many
different implementations of awk were mentioned, but gawk was the big daddy
that supported any feature imaginable in awk.

So, now the question.  Why isn't gawk in the base install?

Mike


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