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Comment by SamWhited | Hacker News Reader

I really wish blog posts like this would at least mention that they are going to use GNUMake extensions. There's some good stuff in here, but just calling it "make" and leaving it at that is misleading. It's not going to work on my minimal (non-GNU) Linux boxes that mostly run NetBSD make (bmake in many distros) or busybox style tools. I know a very small minority of people do something like that (or maybe not, what does Alpine run in containers?), but it seems worth at least a quick footnote to say that most things in here won't be portable.

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  / # make --version
  GNU Make 4.2.1
  Built for x86_64-alpine-linux-musl
  Copyright (C) 1988-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
  This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Good to know; thanks! I'm kind of suprised; given how tiny Alpine is supposed to be and how they're muscl based I assumed they would have taken that philosophy into the userspace tools and used busybox or something. Not that I really know anything about Alpine except that it's nice when you just want something small.

I doubt most people even know that there are different versions. (I didn't!)

It's pretty common knowledge that there are differences from the GNU package set and linux package sets.

I've been exposed to this multiple times: from downloading GNU packages using Homebrew on OSX, downloading different packages on Android, the variety of options available to ArchLinux users, etc.

Anyone with basic Linux knowledge should be well aware of this. From a minimum of following tutorials and having the basic command flags not work on common terminal programs.

I don't agree that "basic Linux knowledge" requires knowing which commands have different versions. You can be intimately familiar with the Linux kernel and never step outside of the GNU environment.

I've never used OSX, and have no desire to compile things on my phone.

And I know that there are non-GNU versions of some tools, like grep, but whenever I've attempted to use them, I find them lacking some key feature that I always use. I can't be bothered to learn the entire set of GNU-improved tools, since I'm always just going to be using the GNU version anyway.

Yah, this is probably true. Another good reason to mention it if you're writing a blog post! :)

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