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OSS Unix: Dividing & Conquering Itself
(Score.5, Interestin writes "Security guru Marcus Ranum has some interesting thoughts about how a continuing lack of consistency among Unix systems (and particularly Linux) is hurting Linux (and remaining commercial Unix vendors like Sun) and helping Microsoft. Admittedly this has been said before, but no-one else quite manages to phrase things the way Marcus can."
This is why more people need to get involved in projects like the Linux Standard Base. If more distros would quit trying to do their own thing and work together, Linux might be able to really take off. Autopackage will help people with installation hell between distros. And hopefully, freedesktop.org's new set of UI standards will help KDE and Gnome people get along a little better too....but then again, we are talking about human beings here.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
standardize your damn directory structures and startup scripts. Or at least come up with some sort of virtual linking scheme to provide one consistant view. "Well, *BSD puts it here, but on Linux it would be there and SYS 5 doesn't have one..."
You have managed to complain about characteristics (in bold above) that make each flavor unique; you should have grumbled about device naming conventions, too, and gone for the trifecta. You may as well complain about the variations in fruit: "well, the banana has a peel that must be removed prior to consumption, while grapes come in bunches, and don't get me started on pomegranates, etc."
The BSDs are generally do things in a similar manner. This is largely historical; it is the BSD Way(tm).
One really shouldn't just say "SYS 5". Not only is the nomenclature wrong - it should be SVR* - one should indicate which revision is under discussion, e.g. SVR3 or SVR4.
News flash: Linux is very much like SVR4. You can do some things (e.g. ps) in BSD style if you like but most practical purposes Linux is ~SVR4.
Solaris >=2 is SVR4-based, as is HP-UX. AIX (IIRC) is SVR3, but AIX administration is (or at least was) its own form of pain so the historical influence is basically a footnote.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
In short, the directory structures are being taken care of.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Photoshop was coded to the MacIntosh user interface, not X-windows, and functions on OSX as a side-effect of the excellent backwards-compatibility that Apple slavishly built into their kernel-swap.
No, it functions because of Carbon, the procedural API of OS X. Carbon does share similarities with the old Mac toolbox.
Perhaps this is what he was saying, but the way he says it implies OS X happily runs old OS 9 binaries due to some "slavishly" added binary compatibility cruft. It doesn't--the apps need a recompile and some code tweaking to become "Carbonized," and suddenly they're OS X apps through and through.