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

[sapienzaf]

On Apr 12, 9:49 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> > b) What it tells me is that there have been (and are) many variations
> > in how Unix and its derivatives are being implemented, and somebody
> > was trying to make sense of it all by creating a set of standards that
> > they should strive to meet.  
>
> Actually, there were two.  BSD and SYSV.
>
> The primary goal was to make SYSVID the common API.  Can't be having
> something free like BSD as the API, now, can we.
>
> GNU and linux are very anti-BSD.  Choosing instead to ape SYSV.  It has
> more to do with the licensing model than technical superiority.
>

So let's see if I'm following correctly.

There were two flavors of Unix: BSD and SYSV.  The POSIX standard was
an attempt to establish SYSV as the common API.  GNU/Linux was
designed to "ape" SYSV, yet it doesn't meet the POSIX standard.  GNU/
Linux is also anti-BSD.

That would make three flavors of Unix now (with multiple variants and
distributions of each), with the risk that some applications developed
on one may not run on either of the others?  Nice standards.

I can see also that the vendor neutrality goals are really starting to
come together.  Pick any hardware platform, then lock yourself in to a
specific Unix distribution.  Or, if you want portability for your
application then you have to include code that identifies which Unix
is running below you and handle the different behaviors as special
cases.  That shouldn't be to difficult to maintain.

> I would have to go back and look, but I thought it was stated right here
> that the POSIX subsystem had been removed from the CONDIST.
>

Dropped from the CONDIST, but not dropped from the product.  You'll
read at the link below that the POSIX interfaces are no longer
layered.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/portability/index.html