
Sbase – Suckless unix tools - Syrup-tan
http://git.2f30.org/sbase/about/
======
prewett
Frankly this about page sucks. I want to like this project, but there is only
one sentence on what it's supposed to replace and why. Apparently this is
supposed to be better than busybox somehow. No information on why busybox
sucks, no information on how sbase sucks less. Is sbase better because it is
smaller, faster, better architected, more POSIX compliant, more useful
features, what? What are the tradeoffs for this? If you're going to make the
claim that you suck less, at least say WHY you suck less.

Even Google doesn't seem to know what sucks less about suckless. The best I
could come up with was "sbase vs busybox" which leads me to [1], where this
exact question was asked, to which the response by the project creator was
"The busybox code sucks." Not helpful at all, which was pointed out one post
later, to which another project member said "Try to read it [the code?] and
understand it." Great. Like I have time to read the code of every project
before I decide to use it.

[1]
[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176854](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176854)

~~~
anewhnaccount
[http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/find.c](http://git.suckless.org/sbase/tree/find.c)

[http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/findutils/find.c](http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/findutils/find.c)

I think one of the main advantages is it's written in the same
straightforward, braindead dialect of C as the other suckless projects. They
are really easy to dive into. (Hence why, eg, dwm has so many derivative.) I
think the suckless folks would consider the fact it doesn't produce a single
fat binary to be an advantage too.

It's part of this project:
[http://morpheus.2f30.org/](http://morpheus.2f30.org/)

~~~
prewett
I think that fat binary might be part of busybox's space saving. Most file-
systems I'm aware of have 4k chunk sizes, and I would expect the last chunk of
a file to be half filled on average, so if you have 20 utilities wasting 2k,
that's a good 40k more on disk. Plus, I expect that many utilities duplicate
functionality (error-checking the input IO and printing informative messages),
so a monolithic binary could save space with only one copy of the boilerplate,
error messages, etc.

Anyway, if they would talk about why they suck less, we could evaluate the
claim. If they were wrong, people could point it out and they could fix it and
verifiably suck less. As it is, we have unsubstantiated claims and fun
speculation.

------
halosghost
Suckless gets a bad rep (probably because of their openness about their
opinions of the projects of which they create alternatives); but, honestly,
they have made some of my absolute favorite utilities. dwm, dmenu and st serve
as the foundation for my whole workflow.

I'd love to see a whole suckless OS someday. I know it's been around for some
time, but it seems like this might be the first step towards that.

~~~
cylinder714
_I 'd love to see a whole suckless OS someday._

That might be Plan 9--or Project Oberon. ;-)

I'm _really_ looking forward to kOS:
[http://www.kparc.com/o.htm](http://www.kparc.com/o.htm)

~~~
halosghost
There are so many things about Plan9 that I deeply love. I need to install
9front and play with it sometime :)

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davexunit
I can't stand the attitude of the suckless project. Apparently all software is
bloated unless in it is written in C, statically linked, and configured only
by modifying a config.h file and rebuilding.

Thanks, but I'll just keep on using the GNU coreutils, Emacs, etc.

------
faragon
Wait. Is that really related to suckless.org? I've just checked that
suckless.org Unix tools are called "9base", not "Sbase", and is different
code. Could someone explain that?

[http://git.suckless.org/9base/tree/cal/cal.c](http://git.suckless.org/9base/tree/cal/cal.c)
[http://git.2f30.org/sbase/tree/cal.c](http://git.2f30.org/sbase/tree/cal.c)

[http://tools.suckless.org/](http://tools.suckless.org/)

~~~
gandarojin
The sbase page on suckless.org is here:

[http://core.suckless.org/sbase](http://core.suckless.org/sbase)

> 9base is a port of various original Plan 9 tools for Unix, based on
> plan9port.

While sbase is supposed to be POSIX-compliant.

~~~
euid
Since that page links to

[1]: [http://git.suckless.org/sbase/](http://git.suckless.org/sbase/)

instead of

[2]: [http://git.2f30.org/sbase/](http://git.2f30.org/sbase/)

I'm guessing [2] is a mirror, and [1] is the original Git repository. They
appear to have the same content.

~~~
faragon
Thank you.

------
xsb
Also, check ubase
[http://git.2f30.org/ubase/about/](http://git.2f30.org/ubase/about/)

------
faragon
It looks well written.

------
Scarbutt
no vi?

~~~
bandrami
The suckless editor is called sandy[0].

[0] [http://tools.suckless.org/sandy](http://tools.suckless.org/sandy)

~~~
smorrow
I wonder why they didn't just make an ncurses frontend to sam. You'd get regex
search, selection-based commands and unlimited undo for free...

