On Mon, Mar 27, 2000 at 06:48:56AM -0600, Stephen J Baker wrote:
> It is a Linux ABI- but that doesn't mean that we have to actively dissuade
> other OS's from picking it up and using it as-is. Certainly the BSD guys
> will want it. Almost all Linux software ends up being ported to BSD
> at some stage - and there is no reason to make that harder than it has
> to be IMHO.
I don't much care what it's called so long as it actually indicates
something about the ABI, not some particular header file that happens to
be part of the ABI - so that we don't have this come up with regard to
some other compiletime feature next week - and so long as there's
disambiguation and versioning involved - so that we can change something
and actually let the ISVs figure out that it changed. But an input
parameter of this group is that it is targeting Linux and X
specifically. Trying to satisfy every possible viewpoint is the primary
reason standards take a lot of work to develop.
The BSD folks are not crying out that their egos are crushed because
their OS isn't mentioned in a preprocessor symbol name, and they are
already supporting defacto Linux ABIs in any event, so why invent a
problem on their behalf? Is LSB now supposed to rename itself "Linux and
all other vaguely Unixlike OSes that want to take advantage of it
Standard Base" too?
Jon Leech
SGI
