On 2021-09-28 02:26, Tor Arntsen via cctalk wrote (in part):
On Mon, 27 Sept 2021 at 23:31, Zane Healy via cctalk
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Sep 27, 2021, at 2:15 PM, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 2021-09-27 10:07, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote (in part):
However, much of the "Linux" software is in fact POSIX software, and can quite
easily be ported between Linux and other *NIX-likes, such as Solaris, macOS and the *BSD
family.
I cannot agree. Many developers ensure that their software runs under their
particular distribution and then call it POSIX. Porting to UNIX systems, such
as Solaris or macOS, can be difficult and tedious. (Of course, this is not a
Linux issue.)
N.
This also sums up nicely what is Linux’s greatest failing. Software vendors
need “Linux”, and what they get is “Red Hat”, “SLES”, “Ubuntu”, etc. and as a
result, the users suffer. This is why most commercial apps target MacOS and
Windows, or more often than not, just Windows.
Everything I personally develop for Linux will build on all Linux
distros, and also IRIX, Solaris, AIX, and, until recently, Tru64
(because I have access to those systems, except for Tru64 now). And to
some extent BSD variants. It's not hard at all.
Writing portable s/w may not be difficult but it takes some discipline
on the part of the programmers. Many programmers only have Linux
distros so they (perhaps understandably) only develop in their environment.
And the company I
work for used to have build systems for all of the above until not
that far ago, but, as customers more and more move to Linux systems
the build support and tests have been removed for most of the rest
(AIX still hangs on by a thread). As for the various Linux distros,
the issue isn't really that they are that different, it's that they
don't have the same version of core software - in particular moving
targets like the C++ compiler (and this goes for various releases of
the same distro too).
I have the same experience. We produced s/w that ran on dozens of
different UNIX and non-UNIX systems including embedded systems. The
main point was to write POSIX C-code (and stay away from the
preprocessor). Our main issue was that native compilers were not always
as compliant as claimed. We were fortunate in that our s/w was either
back-end or embedded without the need -- read headache -- of GUI
interfaces.
N.
