On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Alexander Skwar wrote:
>So sprach Mike A. Harris am Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 08:49:58AM -0400:
>> Personally, the number in use of each type of operating system
>> out there doesn't matter much in terms of portability.
>
>Depends - on the hand, you're of course right - on the other hand, it means
>that not too much energy has got to be spent into portability, if only a
>small fraction might get the benefit of the portability issues.
Yes, I agree with that very much as well. If one must expend 50%
time/effort for 1% users, then one must way the pros and cons of
portability. Personally, I program for Linux first, but with
some level of portability in mind - more or less things that are
convenient, and easy to be clean with. If I have to avoid a
bunch of stuff that makes my life easier in my own code, I would
rather lose some portability just to use more modern code.
One example is bash 2.x. bash 2.x has a lot of cool new
features. In my own scripts for home, I use them all the time.
In scripts for packages I maintain, I avoid bash2 as I would
rather maintain one rpm across 7.x releases as well as 6.x, 5.x.
New packages though I would not think twice about using some
bash2 specific stuff as it makes my job easier. Patches are
accepted from those that want to be uberportable.
>> If one wants to use snazzy modern features, that is ok, but it should be
>> done in a way that falls back to portable methods.
>
>Exactly. Did I say anything different somewhere?
Sorry, it seemed you were implying to use less was portable
because Linux systems outnumber UNIX systems. I guess it was a
misinterpretation though.
Take care,
TTYL
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
Red Hat Inc. Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
http://www.redhat.com Phone: (705)949-2136
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Latest XFree86 test RPMS: ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris/testing
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
