Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 13:22:38 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, Stuart Henderson <stuart@internationalschool.co.uk>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Internet Exploder inseparable from Windows? Message-ID: <19980514132238.A320@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19980514051820.09178@follo.net>; from Eivind Eklund on Thu, May 14, 1998 at 05:18:20AM %2B0200 References: <199805131500.JAA04221@lariat.lariat.org> <3559D317.778BB97@internationalschool.co.uk> <19980514083526.D3535@freebie.lemis.com> <19980514051820.09178@follo.net>
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On Thu, 14 May 1998 at 5:18:20 +0200, Eivind Eklund wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 1998 at 08:35:26AM +0930, Greg Lehey wrote:
>> On Wed, 13 May 1998 at 18:06:31 +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote:
>>> they're talking about an HP version as well... Linux gets a mention on
>>> their web page about the developers though (something about 'operating
>>> system of choice', I think those were the words!)
>>>
>>> in places they manage to make it sound like porting to a different unix
>>> is as difficult as writing a unix version in the first place...
>>
>> It's probably more difficult. A while back I saw a description of how
>> to use pipes with NT. What was a line or two in UNIX became the best
>> part of a page of LongFunctionNames and hundreds of parameters.
>> Posting to UNIX must imply a complete rewrite of the parts which
>> interface with the kernel (or even the C library).
>
> But porting to another Unix when you already have a UNIX port
> shouldn't be too hard unless they've _really_ screwed up.
Correct.
> It is many years since I've seen anything that was really hard to
> port (except kernel drivers, and ps et al).
I have two thoughts on the subject.
1. It's probably not in Microsoft's interests to port to all UNIX
platforms at once. Even if they intend to ensnare UNIX users with
IE, they don't want to give the impression that it's easy to port
to UNIX.
2. After reading the articles, I'm not sure that their people are
very experienced. It's quite conceivable that, faced with the
undoubted obscenities in the Exploder code, they might have made
suboptimal porting decisions.
Greg
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