Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 12:58:38 -0500 From: Mike Barcroft <mike@FreeBSD.org> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> Cc: standards@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto Message-ID: <20021110125838.A52940@espresso.q9media.com> In-Reply-To: <200210262316.g9QNGAWB026174@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>; from wollman@lcs.mit.edu on Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 07:16:10PM -0400 References: <200210262316.g9QNGAWB026174@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[Sorry for the late reply.] Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> 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
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20021110125838.A52940>