Björn Persson wrote:
Linux has always been just a kernel. But what you usually describe is a
complete distribution.
And when you talk about a complete distribution, do you call it "Linux" or do
you call it "Fedora" or "CentOS" or "Slackware"?
Generally "CentOS", since for the reasons I might have to talk about it,
the distribution infrastructure and specific content choices are
important, although I might mention "Fedora" to contrast the infrastructure.
The application I work on in my job uses some Linux-specific features and some
GNU-specific ones. It wouldn't be nearly as good if we'd use only POSIX
interfaces. We could probably port it to one of the BSDs for example, and we
might achieve similar performance there, but currently it requires GNU and
Linux so it could be described as a GNU/Linux application.
The only GNU-specific features that come to the top of my head are the
-a option to cp (and I usually use rsync anyway where it would be
useful) and the copious non-standard options to gnutar that sometimes
turn out to be useful. Are there others that really matter? It would
be nice to have a list to avoid in portable code and scripts.
But sometimes I want to say something about all distributions that are based
on GNU and Linux. Then I call them "GNU/Linux-based distributions". If I
wanted to include Debian GNU/Hurd and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD too, but not
FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD, then I'd say "GNU-based distributions".
If you aren't distributing copies and thus having to pay attention to
the associated source distribution obligation imposed by the GNU/GPL
components there should be little reason to know or care about that
layer of infrastructure or whether it has original unix roots or a bsd
or gnu flavored clone.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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