Re: Bug#34956: ps formatting problem (fwd)
On Thu, Mar 25, 1999 at 03:19:09PM -0500, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> > A better place to look is the C standard itself.
> ...
> > Unix98 says the same thing; quoting
>
> You have shown that the proposed change does not violate either standard.
> Therefore it is legal to make the change.
Not every change that does not violate a standard is a good idea.
> > There is a legitimate argument for this change: compatibility with Solaris
> > and IRIX, possibly all System V-derived systems. Code that relies on this
>
> Make that: Solaris, IRIX, Digital UNIX, and AIX. (basically every UNIX)
> Considering the above, portable UNIX apps may indeed expect a useful
> return value.
No, apps written for those systems may expect a useful return value.
The point of having cross-platform standards like POSIX and Unix98 is
to establish just what can be expected.
> Are we a UNIX clone or a BSD clone?
Neither.
> I see a perfectly good Free Software version of BSD. Actually, there
> are three of them. I don't see a good Free Software version of UNIX.
> It would be pretty stupid to clone existing Free Software. If I want
> to get BSD behavior, duh, I might just get the real thing!
If you wanted to get UNIX behavior, perhaps you should get the real
thing?
> > This has come up repeatedly, and Ulrich has said repeatedly that he
> > will not change the behavior of glibc as distributed upstream.
>
> Fine, Debian has a way to automatically apply patches. This is a good
> patch. It makes it easier to port UNIX code to Linux.
And it introduces an incompatibility between our GNU C Library and that
of every home-grown or alternate distribution. Changing the behavior
of system calls is beyond the intended purpose of the Debian patch
system. The authors of the library make the choice about its
interfaces.
Dan
/--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\
| Daniel Jacobowitz |__| CMU, CS class of 2002 |
| Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Part-Time Systems Programmer |
| dan@debian.org | | drow@cs.cmu.edu |
\--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
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