Linux and GNU at their best 42
Mapc writes "...Couple of years ago (in 1990) there was a study called fuzz which checked quality of UNIX utilities. It has been revisited since then - in 1995 (and in May 1998?). Interestely enough the study shows that GNU utilities and Linux utilities are the best made ones (lowest - 7-9% fail ratio)
The paper is here , the original fuzz program lives on the ftp as well.
Test it on Solaris 7 and tell us the results"
does anyone else find this freakin' ironic? (Score:1)
Ghostscript won't render the paper... (Score:1)
And lose to fanatics who don't (Score:1)
Funny. Quality is impossible in business, but unstoppable as a non-business activity.
GNU Regression test suite? (Score:1)
Are there other tests in the GNU arsenal?
BSD (Score:1)
They are usually a lot simpler than their GNU counterparts.
What about root access? (Score:1)
GNU Ghostscript 4.03 works fine (Score:1)
Using the Results (Score:1)
Why don't we go through that list of utilities the good Professor said failed under Linux and get those bug reports filed, rather than hope that the coders see this paper for themselves? This looks like a perfect means by which non-coders can give something back to the Open Source community.
Worth a thought?
Yes and No.-HTML (Score:1)
Fuzz (Score:1)
Additional URL about fuzz (Score:1)
Also, there is no mention of any 1998 revisit to the study, nor did Prof. Miller mention it while I was working for him in the first half of last year. The "last modified" date on the file is in 1995, so there was probably not a revisit last year.
What about root access? (Score:1)
No Cause for celebration (Score:1)
it performs on an up-to-date linux system. I wish I had more time to do a bit of this sort of testing/fixing.
Sorry, I have to disagree. (Score:1)
Regarding the duality of options, frankly, '-i' means very little to a new user, but '--initialize' provides a hint as to what the option might accomplish. The idea behind long options is to provide a human-parsable alternative to the shorter versions. The overhead of adding this support is extremely low, and the benefits for first-time users more than pay for it.
Info format is awful. You'll hear no argument from me. But think about when it was proposed; the only alternative really was roff. Man pages fail to solve one question in an important two-part problem: how do I learn this, and how do I look up information after I've learned it. Man pages solve the latter. SGML manuals, properly written, can solve both, providing both a tutorial, and a reference.
Attracting newbies isn't the goal; helping people use the system is, on both counts.
No Cause for celebration (Score:1)
Those failure rates are old, and if run on the current GNU tools, you should get better results (since some of the failures have been fixed since then).
It would be interesting to re-run the tests with the latest tool versions.
does anyone else find this freakin' ironic? (Score:1)
Project to fix these bugs (Score:1)
PDF format available for download (Score:1)
http://lonestar.texas.net/~la ndrum/fuzz-revisited.pdf [texas.net]
PDF format available for download (Score:1)
yesterday my total usage for the week was 18.45 megabits (my isp is weird and measures it in bits) and today my total for the week is 72.43 megabits.. since my other sites on there basically suck, i guess this thing is popular
Is the report available in any other formats? (Score:1)
Kris.
No Cause for celebration (Score:1)
GNU utilities got a LOT better since then, and measuring by the size of patch clusters for solaris, sun didn't make much progress.
And secondly, the source is on this ftp as well, fetch it and try it on anything you want.
* When I get a new computer I first of all wipe native utilities, and then install GNU utilities.
They're much more consistent, faster and better.
Linux wouldn't be what it is today if not GNU.
I think that the GNU people deserve a big compliment.
GNU rulz. (Score:1)
I don't agree a single bit with that. Without all the wonderful GNU utilities, my life would be really painful.
The -- for long options is a nice feature. Why do we need two options, you ask? Why not? What's wrong with it? I think its well worth it. They do all your normal non-GNU utilities do and more. I don't use long options that much, but I don't have a problem with 'em. I think the typical newbie you want to attract will find programs easier to use with long options.
Well, I wouldn't completely agree about the info stuff either. While its true that GNU should put more attentions on the manuals, documentation on an hypertext source is really better when you want to learn how to use *new* stuff. As I see it, both things, manual and info, are useful and have different objectives. May be info is not the format to use, but hypertext is the thing. And I have found info useful anyway.
So, you see *data* saying GNU behaves better than anything else and you say they're the worse set of utilities out there ? You think they cheated or do you simply care about "-- and -" and "manual pages missing" more than having a utility do what its meant to do?
Azulejo.
BSD (Score:1)
Sorry, I have to disagree. (Score:1)
I suggest proponents of "creeping featurism" read Gancarz's "The Unix Philosophy" -- and someone send the FSF a copy while you're at it