Thu, 15 Jul 2004
XSIsm are good
Why bother with strict POSIX, which lacks many useful features? The goal should be to write portable shell scripts. Interpreter size is not a good argument either:
md@wonderland:~$size /bin/bash /bin/dash /bin/posh text data bss dec hex filename 604269 21132 18264 643665 9d251 /bin/bash 98612 2720 1804 103136 192e0 /bin/posh 79553 896 10236 90685 1623d /bin/dash md@wonderland:~$
Sergio Talens-Oliag yesterday complained that his new prism54-based WiFi card requires a firmware, but apparently he did not notice that almost every device (from CD readers to modems) has a complex firmware inside it. If it really lacks one then it's a very stupid device which just pushes raw bits over the PCI bus and lets the CPU do all the work.
After a few days of use, I have been able to verify that the new aspell-it package I NMU'ed is much better than the old one and correctly recognizes almost all words I type.