Re: feature-request: add "banner" to coreutils as a standard GNU/Linux utility

[Eric Blake]

> I'm here to ask you evaluate inclusion of a new simple program into coreutils.
> 
> It has a simple name "Banner" and here is the
> Description :
> 

Thanks for the idea.  However, this request has been discussed in the past,
and consensus was that there are two flavors of banner with no standard
requiring one behavior over the other (horizontal vs. vertical), so if
coreutils were to adopt banner, it would have to be rewritten to support
both flavors via options.  Therefore, no existing port of banner is ready
for drop-in inclusion to coreutils.  Furthermore, reusing an existing
implementation as a starting point has legal issues - we would have
to convince all contributors to the original code to assign copyright
to the FSF.  You may be better off writing a banner implementation
from scratch if you really want it included in coreutils.

See this thread for more details:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-07/msg00215.html

-- 
Eric Blake