Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: att & osf Message-ID: <281@quintus.UUCP> Date: 12 Aug 88 19:10:45 GMT References: <4964@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <3395@vpk4.UUCP> <1988Aug2.171126.17906@utzoo.uucp> <3396@vpk4.UUCP> <249@quintus.UUCP> <1275@sfmag.UUCP> <258@quintus.UUCP> <12118@ncoast.UUCP> <268@quintus.UUCP> <644@picuxa.UUCP> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 57 In article <644@picuxa.UUCP> tgr@picuxa.UUCP (Dr. Emilio Lizardo) writes: >In article <268@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >:POSIX will be better for _everybody_ >:(except AT&T) than the SVID, and a document which is totally controlled >:by one company can only be a stopgap as a standard. > >Correct me if I'm wrong (as if I need to say that in this group :-) but >hasn't AT&T publicly committed its support to the POSIX effort? The SVID itself says "The SVID is consistent with the trial-use standard (Novemeber 1985), with several minor exceptions. Full conformance to the IEEE standard will be strongly considered after its formal approval." -- The minor exceptions, by the way, are things like 0 -vs- -1 for non-blocking reads, whether group is inherited from directory or process, all those little things that always made BSD<->ATT porting such fun. When the SVID becomes an extension of POSIX, it will then be seen to have been a stopgap >as a standard<. It will continue to be extremely useful as a guide to System V features which go beyond POSIX. >Why are SVID and POSIX seen to be mutually exclusive? Who said they were? I didn't! Currently, SVID is more "real" than POSIX, in the not-too-distant future POSIX will be more "standard" than SVID. The point is that P1003 is going to supplant SVID _as a standard_. >If you assume that, >because POSIX will be under the "control" of a group other than AT&T, >AT&T will suffer, I think you're mistaken. I didn't say that either. What I said was that POSIX will be _better_ for everybody (except AT&T). It will be good for AT&T, but it won't be better for them than the SVID has been. >As to the last phrase in the cited text above -- I would hardly call SNA >"a stopgap as a standard" (although it's not a document per se). I would hardly call MVS a stopgap as a standard, although it is not a document per se. I would hardly call the Statue of Liberty a stopgap as a standard, although it is not a document per se. It's a funny thing, but I'm using Ethernet, not SNA, and you can get Ethernet cards and drivers for V.3. And the V.3 "TLI" library (which I cannot claim to understand) is described in terms of the ISORM, not in SNA terms. A parallel from the IBM world which is more appropriate: for quite a while the IBM "F-level" PL/I compiler was the de facto standard for PL/I. It hasn't been for some years, and PL/I compiler writers can appeal to a standard (albeit not the world's most comprehensible document...) instead of having to imitate whatever one manufacturer chooses to do. It will be a considerable surprise if the second version of the POSIX standard won't borrow a lot from AT&T's then current version of the SVID. The great thing is that standards don't change fast, so we'll have had a chance to see how AT&T's ideas work out in practice before requiring that everyone support them. To give you an example of why this is good: termcap became a de facto standard. But AT&T decided to produce terminfo instead. For some years I thought of this as NIH syndrome, but it finally penetrated my skull that terminfo is technically better.