[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 16:28:27 +0000
Richard Kettlewell <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo at eircom.net> writes:
> > Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> >> On 11/16/2023 6:38 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> >>> It's never going to be portable to anything but Linux, that's enough
> >>> to write it off for me.
> >> 
> >> Is it surprising that a startup system for Linux is coupled with
> >> Linux?
> >
> > 	Yes given that Linux purports to be a unix which has always had
> > portability as a major feature.
> 
> Portability to different CPUs, sure, but portability of system tools to
> other kernels? Who ever said that was a goal of Linux as such?

	It's always been a goal in the unix world - which Linux seems to be
leaving.

	Linux as an operating system exists because all the tools provided
by the GNU project and MIT X-Windows and ... were designed to be portable
across every variant of unix extant at the time (a lot more than today).
Apart from systemd the only things I know of that only run on Linux and not
on any other unix are commercial closed source binaries - and even most of
them can be run on FreeBSD using the Linux compatibility layer.

	The other major camp of open source unix shares code very freely -
NetBSD's pkgsrc was originally based on FreeBSD ports and is used in
DragonFLyBSD for example. AT&T's SysVR4 was able to incorporate code from
BSD and XENIX because the code was designed to be portable.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency