Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 08:28:54 GMT From: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> To: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman), standards@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto Message-ID: <200210270828.g9R8Ssdr027811@dotar.thuvia.org> In-Reply-To: <mailpost.1035674368.17075@thuvia.demon.co.uk>
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> From: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) > Date: Sat 26 Oct, 2002 > Subject: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto > What it boils down to is that we end up with two completely separate > versions of every utility for which a standard exists -- one which > implements the standard behavior, and one which does not -- for all > time. Broken scripts will never get updated, because script-writers > will hard-code them to ignore the standard utilities and use the > non-standard ones instead. Pre-POSIX.1-2001 scripts are NOT BROKEN. > (We see that already in Solaris, where > many users are totally unaware of the way in which their default > environment differs from what the standard says, blithely trusting in > Sun's conformance claim on the ticklist without investigating all the > myriad actions one must take to get a compliant programming > environment.) Sun care about their customers' applications _and_ they care about standards conformance. If you have a better way to satisfy both requirements, please let us know. That the Standard environment is not the default reflects the fact that existing applications matter more than future ones. The choice is simple: support existing user's applications where possible, or screw them in favour of an ideal. I would dearly like to deploy more FreeBSD systems in the Real World, but it's hard to do that with your vision of FreeBSD, and I have to fall back to systems whose vendors support their customers. But still, I want to move along the standards path too. > Note that I am specifically speaking of the base POSIX standard. I am > not including in this discussion the X/Open System Interfaces option > of POSIX.1-2001, which is in essence the old System V Interface > Definition. To the extent we can support XSI behavior without > conflicts, I think we should do so. I do not think that we should > supply a separate XSI version of utilities which do have significant > conflicts (like `ps'), since our aim is not to emulate System V, and > most of the differences as remain are old System V mistakes. I'm with you on not caring much for XSI. "To the extent we can support XSI behavior without conflicts, I think we should do so." This is simply drawing the line in a different place. Substitute POSIX.1 for XSI and you have my view exactly. If we do have /usr/posix, however, is there any harm in populating it with any XSI-compatible utilities which people are prepared to support? Cheers, Mark. -- Mark Valentine, Thuvia Labs <mark@thuvia.co.uk> <http://www.thuvia.co.uk>; "Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." Mark Valentine uses "We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* and endorses FreeBSD -- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com>; <http://www.freebsd.org>; To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the messagehelp
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