Re: Firmware stuff - was systemd fight
On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 7:57 PM, Bret Busby <bret@busby.net> wrote:
> [...]
> But, Linux, and, the Linux community, should not have the same objective; it
> should instead, be preserving the (that I believe to be) primary objective
> of UNIX; that a programme that is written for one version, can run on any
> version, unless it is harmful, in which case, it gets blocked, and the
> user/administrator, notified.
Welcome to the real world. I have sometimes been suspicious that
Microsoft has deliberately acted to encourage the Linux community
developers to get the featuritis disease, but I guess the devs have
natural curiousity and itches they like to scratch. I agree that it's
distressing that functionality gets left behind.
> If I write a FORTAN 4 program, I expect it to be able to run on a FORTRAN 77
> platform, or, a FORTRAN 90 platform (I do not know what is the current
> latest ANSI standard version of FORTRAN - my FORTRAN programming ended,
> when FORTRAN 90 was just a proposal), otherwise, I would regard the
> subsequent platform on which it would not run, as defective.
My memory of F77 was that you had to use special switches to enable
all the old ForTran IV stuff.
Do you remember the three-way branches, by the way? (Or am I confusing
ForTran IV with ForTran I or the assembly language of one of the small
minis that we ran ForTran on in the sixties? -- we the community, that
is. I never had access to the actual machines, just the books about
fifteen years later in the college library.)
> Similarly, if I wrote a program in UNIX "C", I woud expect it to run on any
> version of UNIX, and, hopefully, Linux, that was created at or after the
> same time as the UNIC "C" development environment.
You are surely disappointed, then?
Now, when I brushed off that old M6800 assembler I wrote for a college
class in the '80s and compiled it on current Linux, I actually only
had to fix a few minor things, bugs, really. A couple of places where
I hadn't realized I was accessing a NULL pointer, that kind of stuff.
Some of the other programs I wrote back then did not fare as well.
> I have a photovoltaic inverter output data logging program, that is
> apparently written for MS Windows XP (the only version of the particular
> programme, of which I am aware). If that would not run on MS Windows version
> 7 (from what I have seen of MS Windows 8, about the best analogy to MS
> Windows 8, of which I can think, is that it reminds me of what we used to
> shovel out of the yard, after the cows were milked, except, the stuff that
> we used to shovel out of the yard, after the cows were milked, was useful,
> and, out of it, coud grow, useful things), I would regard MS Windows 7, as
> defective.
>
> If nothing else, MS Windows 7, in the case of the photovoltaic output data
> logging software programme, and, similarly, Linux, in the case of drivers,
> should be able to run an instance of the programme, in an emulation of the
> earlier version of the operating system, on the curent version of the
> operating system, in a virtual machine, or something, if it would not run
> "natively" in the later version of the operating system.
>
> But, I see no reason why a later version of an operating system, should not
> be able to natively run software written for an earlier version of the
> operating system, with, if needed, protections inbuilt into the later
> version of the operating system.
>
> The lack of that backward compatibility, is probably the cause of most of
> the problems encountered with current operating systems - "This
> functionality is gone! It does not work anymore!".
Ideally, sure. But in the real world, we haven't figured out how to
deal with evolving ABIs and properly emulating past ABIs. If you have,
for instance, a drive train that works for square wheels, it probably
won't work well for round ones.
And a lot of what we do on computers, even these days, is like trying
to use square wheels, just because we haven't figured out how to make
the wheels round without destroying them. So t speak. This is very
much an evolving technology.
I'm not defending Microsoft, by the way. They go way too far. But
computer technology is still very much evolving.
--
Joel Rees
Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.
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