2008/6/30 Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net>: >> It isn't the developers we are punishing by not >> implementing this case, >> many of them don't care anyway, but we are hurting >> adoption of >> OpenSolaris and making it difficult to impossible to >> run some critical >> applications. > > Short-term, absolutely. Long-term, _educating_the_developers_ > to minimize and isolate platform-dependent code would help a lot more. > It would even be in their own best interests (Solaris has DTrace!) to have > their code not coupled to any one platform. > > It's not that changing the printf behavior is wrong, it's that it's > _incomplete_ > without going after the real problem, namely training the coders.
This isn't about "right or wrong" behaviour. It is about application availability. While I personally would never rely on NULL being accepted by printf, I cannot fault others for relying on platform-specific behaviour. The reality is that most "POSIX/*NIX" applications today are written for GNU/Linux systems, not Solaris. To drive developer and user adoption, we have to ensure existing software is available, and changes like this will drive that adoption. The mentality of "re-education", while perhaps technically correct, is ultimately wrong for adoption purposes in my view. Ultimately, the burden of ensuring that these applications do the right thing will lie on whoever maintains the port to Solaris, not on the original developer. As such, re-education is not a realistic answer. -- Shawn Walker
