[Raion]

So here's what I've been doing on the IRIX side of things over the last few months besides documentation:

Let's face it. IRIX has a lot of really shitty internals for its age. The good thing is, a number of components are FOSS, and I've been looking into the best modern replacements. Thus far, here's my findings:

/bin/ksh and /bin/sh on the system can be replaced by the mirbsd mksh and I have had nothing fail on IRIX, commercial or FOSS, using mksh instead. It's a better shell, and it has far more usability.

/bin/tcsh can be upgraded with the latest tcsh 6.20 - this is the login shell I use. Yes, I know a lot of you like bash and zsh - but those didn't come stock on IRIX and I'm against any requirements of GPLv3 components to use basic IRIX packages or anything like that.

find could be replaced by BSD find - probably the netbsd version is the best for portability sake. The IRIX find is pretty ass.

awk - you can use either bsd awk or gnu awk - as much as I hate GNU utils, gnu awk is more common and required for building a lot of stuff, so I was thinking if I patched it in I would include an option for GPLv3 encumbered versions (later versions of awk)

libarchive's bsdtar/bsdcat replace the local cat and tar pretty nicely - I was able to get inst to use bsdtar when I tried it - but this may not fare as well for others. I had to wrestle it a bit. For reference, previous attempts to force GNU tar to work on inst have been shiite.

Why are you doing this??

I believe that if you want to keep IRIX's vintage usage relevant, that offering drop-in upgrades and patches for things is smart. Other than a very old version of Framemaker which could probably be patched to work with mksh - I've found NOTHING that broke by updating to GNU awk, gnu find, and the updated shells. This includes the most commonly used programs both FOSS and commercial.

Keeping things in there for the sake of "historical usage" or unseen compatibility issues seems really short-sighted - as upgrading the base system's userland with new FOSS components would at least reduce the need for outside packages, especially GPL3 encumbered software. Yes, I don't like GPL, but GPLv2 stuff is so common it's kind of hard to avoid - but of course, some don't seem to care as much.

At least for things like shell scripts and the like, patching them should be relatively easy to do. Library changes, otoh, will require more care.

Anyone got any suggestions or thoughts?