Standards philosophy
At the risk of starting a flamewar, here are some thoughts from rms on
standards philosophy. This is relevant because there may be
some overlap between what rms is saying and The Linux Way.
Richard: It could, except that we don't religiously try to follow
[POSIX]. You have the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable.
Linuxcare: There are specific examples where POSIX is specifically
seen as backwards compatibility.
Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are
useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of
systems, and then they help system implementers figure out how to
give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat
standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support
standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from
them when that becomes more useful to users.
[snip discussion of how GNU users when polled voted for "du" output
in kilobytes but the standard picked 512 byte blocks anyway]
http://www.linuxcare.com/news_columns/interviews/index.epl
Reply to: