Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 06:42:47 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com>, "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: OT: non-Unix history (Was: FreeBSD vs linux) Message-ID: <20010125064247.A992@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <14959.23870.728403.859934@guru.mired.org>; from mwm@mired.org on Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 04:54:54PM -0600 References: <14957.31196.939559.889627@guru.mired.org> <3A6F43F7.E43C6CA0@nisser.com> <14959.23870.728403.859934@guru.mired.org>
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On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 04:54:54PM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote: > Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> types: > > Mike Meyer wrote: > license. But they changed it later. Ditto for Sun and Mips - both > started on BSD with a SysIII license, then went to SysV. But The Unix > market splintering that way was what "the kernel APIs being different" > was referring to. You couldn't port an application to Unix - you had > to port it to each variant. I have some experience of UNIX portations, both retrospectively and developing software from scratch designed to run on multiple UNICes. It is not at all easy, no universal compiler options, higly machine dependent access to shared memory, antique verions of system programs (HP being the worst culprit in this regard), no universal debugger (no, not even sdb), ludicrous differences in shell behaviour (there may be a standard Korn Shell but I have yet to find it), bugs in NFS inter-operability, wildly different versions of different programs such as cpio (they can't all be POSIX compliant and still have such different behaviour sir, surely)... the list is very long. It is no better today. A few days ago I discovered that on Sun Solaris8 certain benign (if pointless) behaviour with regard to shared memory attachments is ignored, on HP-UX 11 it generates a SEGV. Yes, yes, I know shared memory is the *most* system dependent of the IPC features, but the same API should produce the same behaviour .. wherever lol. If only... Even GCC is not quite the panacea it should be... Cliff So it goes .. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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