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LSB & Posix Conflicts

An anonymous reader writes "The OpenGroup has published a detailed list of the conflicts between the Linux Standards Base and Posix ? that is accessible through their website. "

6 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. POSIX LSB by Gorny · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IMHO it's better for GNU/Linux (never know if rms is watching ;) to comply to the older POSIX standards than a nice utopian LSB. I doubt if it will ever get of the ground since the whole Linux distro's are so scattered and divided (let alone the commmercialization of certain products).

    btw. check the following for more information on POSIX
    http://www.posix.com/
    http://standards.iee e.org/regauth/posix/

    --
    Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
  2. Re:Oh yeah? POSIX can be DUMB! by __past__ · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Doesn't matter a bit. If anything, issue a warning if someone uses a potentially dangerous function (like FreeBSD does for stuff like mktemp, the linker will print "Warning: Potentially unsafe use of mktemp, consider using mkstemp instead" or some such), but don't break apps that adhere to the standard. It has "portable" in its name for a reason.

    Even the bash approach where you have to explicitly ask for POSIX-conforming behaviour is better than nothing, even if I think that it should be the default.

    There are only two sane ways to deal with POSIX brain-damage: Fix POSIX, or don't use that stuff in your programs. OSes that are "mostly" POSIX-compatible are worse for portability that those who just say that they don't implement POSIX at all.

  3. Re:Oh yeah? POSIX can be DUMB! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Errr, no, we need to actually eliminate these functions that are unsafe by design, and if a program uses gets(), then too bad, it needs rewritten by an actual programmer and it can't be ported until it is rewritten.

    This is on the same scale as your mother asking, "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump."

    Them even bringing up gets() makes me doubt their whole report. If the rest of their comments are on the same scale as this, I'd say go with the LSB everytime.

    The LSB overrides and superceeds all previous standards with a single common way of doing things that actually halfway makes sense.

  4. Re:POSIX is required! by pmsyyz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ask yourself this: can you read a copy of the POSIX standards online?

    No, that's why Linus couldn't implement it fully.

    --
    Phillip
  5. Question... by Hard_Code · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What does POSIX have to do with the standard C library? We live in a world where C is no longer the only language used. Why can't the spec be split into "system stuff" and independent "cross-platform (your favorite language) requirements"?

    --

    It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  6. Re:Oh yeah? POSIX can be DUMB! by natmsincome.com · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Both of your solutions don't work. You can't fix POSIX. It takes years to add stuff to a standard (that's why it a standard) Even if you were able to add it you end up with stuff like sql where all the big SQL database support sql 92 but none support sql 97(I might have go the dates wrong). Noone supports the latest sql so there's no point learning it since everyone supports different parts of it. One of the main reason why the LSB was formed was that adding stuff to POSIX takes to long and they wanted to define stuff that's outside of the scrope of POSIX.

    The second comment it also wrong. If you have systems that are 90% POSIX compatable it much easier to port software to it than if it's 0% POSIX compatable. In the end you have a lot of #ifdef in you code or in the portable classes. The less #ifdef you have to do the easier it is. It does make it harder to debug though as you have to know the subtle differances.

    Most of the time though you use a library that wrapes it all up for you like wxWindows or POSIX that makes it fairly portable. You just have to alway remember that different OS have different levels of completeness.