From owner-freebsd-standards Sun Nov 10 10: 7:31 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-standards@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F263937B4EB for ; Sun, 10 Nov 2002 10:07:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from espresso.q9media.com (espresso.q9media.com [65.39.129.122]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A8A343E4A for ; Sun, 10 Nov 2002 10:07:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@espresso.q9media.com) Received: by espresso.q9media.com (Postfix, from userid 1002) id 82C309BC3; Sun, 10 Nov 2002 12:58:38 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 12:58:38 -0500 From: Mike Barcroft To: Garrett Wollman Cc: standards@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto Message-ID: <20021110125838.A52940@espresso.q9media.com> References: <200210262316.g9QNGAWB026174@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200210262316.g9QNGAWB026174@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>; from wollman@lcs.mit.edu on Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 07:16:10PM -0400 Organization: The FreeBSD Project Sender: owner-freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Sorry for the late reply.] Garrett Wollman writes: > 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. (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.) > > That way lies madness. Every question about a standard utility will > then become unanswerable without a piece of information users would be > surprised and in some cases hard-pressed to answer. Ultimately, I > think it's less of a POLA violation to tell our users, ``this used to > work this way, but now there's a standard that says it works that way > instead, and we wanted to comply with the standard'', than it is to > encourage the creation of scripts which only work when one of multiple > official FreeBSD versions of a utility is found in the search path > first. I agree that our aim should be for full compliance to the base standard, but I don't think there's enough support from the rest of the developer community to opt for the standard behaviour in the case of some conflicts. Taking this into consideration, I feel the next best thing would be to provide alternative versions of utilities and make a POSIX version of FreeBSD that could be built with a knob at `make release'-time. (This should shed some light on why I prefer /usr/posix/bin with seperate manuals.) > 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. Yes, I think this is outside the scope of the current project, but perhaps we might want to investigate this in the future. I think it would be of benefit to provide an alternative XSI (SYSV) version of ps(1) for transitioning SYSV users to BSD. Best regards, Mike Barcroft To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message