[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Richard Kettlewell]

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo at eircom.net> writes:

> 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.

Maybe. It was certainly convenient for certain components to be
portable, like X11 as you mention, but I think it’s a stretch to infer
that there was a widely shared goal that the lower-level system tools
should be portable too. Things like, say, package management and device
driver handling have been very different across platforms for a very
long time (the former in fact even within Linux).

In the more recent case of systemd, a lot of the functionality depends
on Linux-specific interfaces. Porting it would presumably be a
non-starter until this existed in some form in other operating systems,
and nobody maintaining other operating systems seems to be interested in
doing so.

> 	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).

That doesn’t make it a goal _of Linux_, even if it was a goal of the GNU
and X11 projects.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/