Re: Is the FHS dead ?
On 2/24/09, Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 08:20:31AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> >
> > Interesting. And yes, illustrative of the historically (and, should I
> > add, ridiculous? No, I'd better not ;-) ) rivality between Linux and
> > the *BSDs, big egos included.
>
>
> Well, the last time we tried to make reasonable accomodations for
> *BSD's, some of the biggest biggest whiners^H^H^H^H^H^H^H complaints
> came from Debian. In fact, some later complaints from Debianites
> about the lack of /usr/libexec is largely the fault of Ian Jackson,
> who ***strenuously*** opposed /usr/libexec on the mail thread which I
> quoted. In fact, as I recall, he threatened to rally all of Debian
> NOT to support the FSSTND/FHS if we didn't drop /usr/libexec from the
> draft spec. Ah, history.....
>
> The painful fact of the matter is that anytime a draft like the FHS
> forces any distribution or OS to change, there will be opposition. In
> some cases it will be principled and constructive. In other cases, it
> will question the spec writers' technical judgement, ethics, and even
> their paternity.
>
>
> > However, Linux's position WRT the commercial Unixes has radically
> > shifted in the last decade. Linux is no longer considered a toy, and
> > is taken seriously into account. So, even with the big inertia that
> > might hamper more than one initiative, perhaps the FHS could be pushed
> > in collaboration with their respective companies? At least, I'd be
> > surprised if -say- the Solaris or HPUX people weren't open to
> > discussion leading to better interoperability.
>
>
> Last I heard, HPUX is on maintenance life-support, and they don't have
> enough engineers to make sure their userspace is uptodate.
>
> And as far as Solaris is concerned, they currently have a project to
> update to a 16-year-old shell (ksh93) in their distribution.
FYI the latest version of ksh93 is from Feb 2009.
ksh93 was picked by Sun as new system shell in Solaris with a
competition between bash 3, bash 4, dash, ksh93, mksh, pdksh and zsh.
ksh93 is between 2 and 68 times faster than all other shells, conforms
to posix without the extra options such as the POSIXLY_CORRECT junk
and has a stable programming interface since 1993 (hence the name).
Josh
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