At 12:09 PM 12/26/2002, Glenn wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 06:16:01PM +0100, Sander Striker wrote:
>>
>>> on http://httpd.apache.org/ one can read:
>>> The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an
>>> open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX
>>> and Windows NT.
>>>
>>> Well, since the name Windows NT is not used for Windows products since 2000,
>>> your product might look very outdated, if you tell the people that Windows NT
>>> is a modern operating system and that your webserver is targetted to Windows
>>> NT. I think, saying "Windows" or something similar might be better than
>>> saying "Windows NT".
>>
>> Since Windows 2000 == Windows NT 5.0 I don't think it is really
>> a big problem. We could probably rephrase to 'targetted for
>> windows nt, 2000 and beyond'.
>
>How about simply "including UNIX and MS Windows"?
>The immediately prior phrase says "modern operating systems" with the key
>word being "modern".
Modern is an interesting choice of terms, since Unix remains the preferred
deployment platform for Apache, and it is *how* old exactly :-?
>IIRC, Windows 95 was already discontinued my Microsoft and Windows 98 and NT
>are being dropped from the MS list of supported platforms after June 30, 2003.
This is the argument against using the term MS Windows. Believe me, there
are *many* Win9x (ME) users around, and we want to make it clear that the
*target* platform is Windows NT (4.0, 5.0 {2K}, 5.1 {XP}) and so on.
Just as folks who use Mac OS X are educated that they are running a Darwin
kernel, we simply need to educate users up front that their 2k or XP is still NT.
>As for unices, I doubt Apache 2 would run on older unices that don't have
>the requisite minimal POSIX support. "modern operating systems" says it well.
True enough. I doubt anyone will invest in porting to any older HP/UX, BSD
or other flavors. Even the post-POSIX world isn't necessarily sufficient now
that we rely on Autoconf/M4/Libtool. A moderately up to date make, shell,
etc are obviously also required.
Let's leave "Windows NT" as is, and add the parenthetical comment
"(including Windows 2000 and XP)" once at the head of such documents.
Imagine once we support ".Net Server" and folks start asking why we
don't asp.net in the core distro?
I don't think we want to try to keep up with MS's naming conventions,
Windows NT already describes the whole family and will continue to
do so until that kernel goes the way of the 9x generation.
Bill
