[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[Richard B. Gilbert]

sapienzaf wrote:
> On Apr 11, 9:32 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>> Actually,
>> there is a standard for what an OS should provide.  It's called POSIX.
>> Which OS come closer?
>>
> 
> The POSIX standard is a set of features that Unix-like operating
> systems should provide, and not a standard for the design of any
> operating system in general.
> 
> POSIX = "Portable Operating System Interface for Unix".  Note the "for
> Unix" part of the acronym.  That hardly establishes it as "a standard
> for what an OS should provide", in the general sense of your
> statement.
> 
> Though I haven't confirmed it, according to some sources many of the
> open-source Unix-like operating systems aren't fully POSIX compliant.
> GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD are on the not-fully-compliant
> list.
> 
> You should do the research yourself to answer the question "which OS
> comes closer".  You'll have to provide a comparison of the compliant
> and non-compliant features of OpenVMS (with the POSIX libaries
> installed) versus any particular distribution of Linux or whichever
> Unix variant you have in mind.  I'm sure it will be informative for
> all of us to see the results of your research.

Even POSIX, at least on VMS, does not automagically make it possible to 
build and run Unix software.  I once tried to build NTP from source on 
VMS+POSIX.  It couldn't even run the configure script!