4 ms·

Honestly, what do we need POSIX for in 2020? As discussed in the talk, it traces to the age of the Unix wars, when there was a panoply of processors and Unix va

Honestly, what do we need POSIX for in 2020? As discussed in the talk, it traces to the age of the Unix wars, when there was a panoply of processors and Unix variants. POSIX is great if you’re concerned with recompiling some C so it works on SPARC and Alpha and POWER, on Solaris, Tru64, and AIX. That world is gone. Yes, I’m for abandoning pointless standards. There are concrete benefits to systemd - faster boot, comprehensive service management, power savings, memory savings, a consistent interface to changing system state. What is the benefit to sticking with an rc script architecture designed to run a handful of processes on a pdp?

tal8d 6y ago
> Honestly, what do we need POSIX for in 2020? You've never written portable software, have you? You can't write portable software without a common interface. Have you ever looked at what autotools vomits out? You'll see shell scripts containing the likes of "echo $1 | sed 's/^x//'" in order to just get things to where they have a chance of sharing enough commonality to compile. Imagine how much worse it would be without POSIX. Nothing would run on anything that the developers didn't account for, this includes OS (plus version), environment, and hardware architecture. That is the world you are asking for, not the one we presently live in. > What is the benefit to sticking with an rc script architecture designed to run a handful of processes on a pdp? Freedom, for not only the end user but all the way up to distro packager. Systemd is designed to be non-portable, and force a network-effect pressure. I was similarly suspicious about WSL designing toward a linux API instead of POSIX... an effort to reduce the potential for alternatives emerging in the future, where your choices are windows or linux.
- oblio 6y ago
  > That is the world you are asking for, not the one we presently live in. So, like mobile? Which is 70%+ of computing these days? :-) > Freedom, for not only the end user but all the way up to distro packager. Systemd is designed to be non-portable, and force a network-effect pressure. I was similarly suspicious about WSL designing toward a linux API instead of POSIX... an effort to reduce the potential for alternatives emerging in the future, where your choices are windows or linux. Freedom to do what? Init systems should be a solved problem, done and done. Innovation should happen higher up the stack, the init system should be uniform, hopefully flexible and universally adopted, and ideally standardized fully (as in ECMA & co.).
  - tal8d 6y ago
    > So, like mobile? Which is 70%+ of computing these days? :-) Media consumption spy devices + smiley emoticon. Yuck. > ...and ideally standardized fully... uh, you know that you are advocating for the direct opposite of that - right? Systemd is designed to be impossible to use outside of linux. So what, everyone should adopt the perpetually changing linux ABI as their point of commonality? You know that would be insanely stupid, right?
    - oblio 6y ago
      My point is that they should turn systemd into a real standard.
      - tal8d 6y ago
        My point is that systemd is intentionally designed to make that impossible to do without also pulling linux (ABI, environment, whatever) within the same standard.

tal8d 6y ago

> Honestly, what do we need POSIX for in 2020? You've never written portable software, have you? You can't write portable software without a common interface. Have you ever looked at what autotools vomits out? You'll see shell scripts containing the likes of "echo $1 | sed 's/^x//'" in order to just get things to where they have a chance of sharing enough commonality to compile. Imagine how much worse it would be without POSIX. Nothing would run on anything that the developers didn't account for, this includes OS (plus version), environment, and hardware architecture. That is the world you are asking for, not the one we presently live in. > What is the benefit to sticking with an rc script architecture designed to run a handful of processes on a pdp? Freedom, for not only the end user but all the way up to distro packager. Systemd is designed to be non-portable, and force a network-effect pressure. I was similarly suspicious about WSL designing toward a linux API instead of POSIX... an effort to reduce the potential for alternatives emerging in the future, where your choices are windows or linux.

oblio 6y ago
> That is the world you are asking for, not the one we presently live in. So, like mobile? Which is 70%+ of computing these days? :-) > Freedom, for not only the end user but all the way up to distro packager. Systemd is designed to be non-portable, and force a network-effect pressure. I was similarly suspicious about WSL designing toward a linux API instead of POSIX... an effort to reduce the potential for alternatives emerging in the future, where your choices are windows or linux. Freedom to do what? Init systems should be a solved problem, done and done. Innovation should happen higher up the stack, the init system should be uniform, hopefully flexible and universally adopted, and ideally standardized fully (as in ECMA & co.).
- tal8d 6y ago
  > So, like mobile? Which is 70%+ of computing these days? :-) Media consumption spy devices + smiley emoticon. Yuck. > ...and ideally standardized fully... uh, you know that you are advocating for the direct opposite of that - right? Systemd is designed to be impossible to use outside of linux. So what, everyone should adopt the perpetually changing linux ABI as their point of commonality? You know that would be insanely stupid, right?
  - oblio 6y ago
    My point is that they should turn systemd into a real standard.
    - tal8d 6y ago
      My point is that systemd is intentionally designed to make that impossible to do without also pulling linux (ABI, environment, whatever) within the same standard.