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by dale_glass 1037 days ago
I don't think GNU has ever committed to any kind of minimalist philosophy.

Have you seen the number of flags every command has? ls has almost the entire alphabet taken.
3 comments
mattkrause 1036 days ago
From the GNU Fortran manual:

“9.5 Case Sensitivity There are 66 useful settings that affect case sensitivity, plus 10 settings that are nearly useless, with the remaining 116 settings being either redundant or useless.”

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.6/g77/Case-Sensitivit...

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rollcat 1036 days ago
GNU had to create a convention for the --long flags to fit all of their options.

I think the convention itself is good - I prefer long flags in scripts for improved readability.

But GNU is anything but minimal - compare GNU ls[1] with BSD ls[2], and try to recall the last time you needed --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir.

    [1]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/ls
    [2]: http://man.openbsd.org/ls
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jmclnx 1036 days ago
>I don't think GNU has ever committed to any kind of minimalist philosophy

So true. I remember early on when GNU was started, people in the project where saying and developing with something like this in mind (paraphrasing):

"Make sure it works and meet users needs, even if it is too heavy for current systems, the hardware will improve as time goes on"

And that came true, for example, emacs is a lite ballerina compared to current IDEs.

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