On 12/05/07, Glynn Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Shawn Walker wrote:
> As long as there is a way for users to get a fully standards-compliant
> environment when they need / want it, I'm happy. Solaris' strict
> standards compliance is one of the things I liked about it most. I
> started using GNU/Linux in 1996, and didn't start using Solaris until
> 2005. Standards compliance and documentation were the two areas the
> stood out the most when I started using it.
I agree with everything you've said, but I do wonder what happens when volume
overcomes standards. For example, in GNOME/KDE/... we don't really have any real
formal standards body behind a lot of our freedesktop.org based work. We use the
term 'defacto standard' to pretty much mean that the technology has been
discussed, a document written describing it, and adopted by enough projects that
have influence over a volume of users.
Are we getting to the stage where volume is trumping an official formal
standard? - it's an open question, I don't have any answers.
Even if that were the case, even the GNU world has problem with its
own tools. For example, newer versions of GNU tar support a special
command line option to not preserve permissions when extracting, while
older versions do not. Because there is no overall specific standard,
programs that use these tools have to parse the version output of the
utility to try to determine what options they can use or how to
perform extractions.
Whereas, with POSIX/Solaris, etc. I can set my path appropriately and
get guaranteed specific behaviour.
So, one technically can't even set a "GNU" environment switch and get
guaranteed behaviour.
I don't know what the solution to that problem is for the "GNU"
userland, but I know Solaris already has one for its environment...
--
"Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
