[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:08:03 +0000
Richard Kettlewell <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:

> 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).

	Package management is a relatively new feature of unix (it's
about half the age of unix) - but NetBSD's pkgsrc is designed to be portable
and can be used on pretty much any unix including Linux. The FreeBSD ports
system (one of the first) is written in make and the system (but not the
ports themselves) would be easy enough to get going on any other unix with
a BSD compatible make available.

	Device drivers are of course largely kernel dependent and generally
not portable - notable exception for DRI/DRM which are surprisingly
portable. That being said it is quite common to port device drivers between
the BSDs despite the divergence in the kernels over the years, none of them
would take Linux device drivers because GPL.

> In the more recent case of systemd, a lot of the functionality depends
> on Linux-specific interfaces. Porting it would presumably be a

	Apart from systemd every other init system is shell script based
and reasonably easy to port, systemd is a huge departure from convention.

> 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.

	Nobody maintaining other operating systems wants them to become
Linux based which is essentially what would be needed.

> > 	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.

	You missed the "and ...", Linux based OSs are the odd ones out in
this regard which is sad given that Linux as an OS owes its entire
existence to the fact that everyone else in the unix world cares about
portability. Without the GNU project's portable utilities there would be no
Linux distros, there wouldn't even be a compiler to build the kernel! If
MIT had chosen to make X11 tightly bound to a single kernel there would be
no Linux graphics.

	IMHO it should be a goal of Linux OS development to be a good
member of the unix community without which there would be no Linux. But
you're right it seems that it isn't something that RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu
et al care about.

-- 
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