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As far as I can tell, POSIX was an attempt to codify existing practice amongst Unix vendors, picking the best of the most widely supported features, as opposed
by sethrin 10y ago
As far as I can tell, POSIX was an attempt to codify existing practice amongst Unix vendors, picking the best of the most widely supported features, as opposed to actually trying to come up with a good standard. From reading UHH, one might almost be tempted to say that the only thing worse than POSIX was leaving things up to the vendors. Either way, POSIX seems to have dealt with a lot of interop issues, but it has fallen so far behind the curve that it hardly even makes sense to talk about. The article compares Android, OSX, and Ubuntu. If you were going to have a conversation about interoperability between those platforms, would you be thinking about POSIX? Or perhaps some web standard?
Standards probably shouldn't sit still, especially if they hew more closely towards existing practice than ideal practice. I think POSIX is overdue for an update.
As an aside though, did people ever voluntarily use csh? Aside from committed masochists, that is.
- pjmlp 10y agoFor me POSIX always looked like the C runtime part that vendors didn't want to make part of ANSI C, thus creating a separate standard instead.
- majewsky 10y ago> I think POSIX is overdue for an update. POSIX is being updated constantly. It is just not as noticeable because POSIX is, as you say, > an attempt to codify existing practice amongst Unix vendors, picking the best of the most widely supported features, as opposed to actually trying to come up with a good standard.
- yuubi 10y ago> did people ever voluntarily use csh? Yes, for an interactive shell, back when the choice was between csh that had command-line history and sh that didn't.