I will provide an example, the
Some of its drawbacks, such as enabling frequently used options by default can be easily solved with aliases. However, some of the functionalities are simply missing and one has to use different program. I am aware, that grep has to stay backward compatible, and one can't simply change its user interface. But one could simply add options for multi threading and parsing .gitignore files that would be disabled by default. The first thing I do after the system installation is installing ripgrep. I really do not like this fact. This could be avoided if system utilities get backward compatible improvements. Is there any rule forbidding improving standard utilities?
I see a trend to re-implement tools with only slight differences. In my humble opinion this is insane. It is like neglecting several dozen years of history. It is a bit like improving via revolution instead of evolution. I understand that such approach might be preferred in Linux, where there is simply a kernel and multiple distributions. However, does FreeBSD also has to follow this path?
grep
program. It is one of the most famous Unix utilities and comes with the system by default. But lets face the truth, its performance and experience is poor comparing to ripgrep or The Silver Searcher. I can't even remember when I have used grep without passing any extra options such as -E
, -r
or -n
. It has no multi threading support, and it is not capable of making any use of files such as .gitignore for excluding directories.Some of its drawbacks, such as enabling frequently used options by default can be easily solved with aliases. However, some of the functionalities are simply missing and one has to use different program. I am aware, that grep has to stay backward compatible, and one can't simply change its user interface. But one could simply add options for multi threading and parsing .gitignore files that would be disabled by default. The first thing I do after the system installation is installing ripgrep. I really do not like this fact. This could be avoided if system utilities get backward compatible improvements. Is there any rule forbidding improving standard utilities?
I see a trend to re-implement tools with only slight differences. In my humble opinion this is insane. It is like neglecting several dozen years of history. It is a bit like improving via revolution instead of evolution. I understand that such approach might be preferred in Linux, where there is simply a kernel and multiple distributions. However, does FreeBSD also has to follow this path?