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I agree with the OP and with jerven's reply. Just one question: What makes POSIX, and Unix in general, so sacred that an anti-POSIX agenda is inherently a terri

I agree with the OP and with jerven's reply. Just one question: What makes POSIX, and Unix in general, so sacred that an anti-POSIX agenda is inherently a terrible thing, worth being opposed with such vitriol? Unix is just one way of many to put together an operating system. If the major GNU/Linux developers, inspired by Mr. Poettering, want to try a different direction, they're entitled to do that.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Academically I agree. But practically, Unix is a fractured mirror of mostly-similar OSs. Adding one more is what everybody always does. Even POSIX was supposed to be some unifying thing, but its fractured too.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  So how can we strengthen POSIX so that all the fractures/forks can merge again on one target?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Then we would have ... one more version of POSIX.
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      Perhaps a contract from all alternative implementations to abandon their individual forks and work on the "one true POSIX" would solve this, so it doesn't go into XKCD land?
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        If you were a Jedi and your mind were stronger than everybody, maybe that would work. But folks can fork things any time they like, and they do.
        anonbanker 12y ago
        I think what I'm trying to ask is, has any successfully merged forked projects? What would be required to reconcile everyone's issues enough to make everyone work on one codebase?
        JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Not sure anyone involved wants to. There was an effort marketed as "Unify Unix" or some such. Sun, Hp, somebody else were the founding partners. Much hoopla. One the day they were supposed to be done, each founding partner announced their own branded, extended version of Unix that was better than the unified version. You know, so they could out-sell their competition. End result: 3 more versions of Unix.
anonbanker 12y ago
It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. What made unices popular was their ubiquitousness. If you had a BSD machine on the same network as a Linux or SunOS machine, they can communicate using standard protocols. Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX implementations. The Unix Way is to have small programs that do one thing extremely well; when an application (with the exception of emacs) starts emulating Zawinski's Law, they're usually broken up into smaller pieces. I do not want one app that handles cd, ls, pwd, rm, mv, etc. I suspect that if Poettering/Sievers released an app (let's call it "fileD") that did exactly that, the Unix community would gather the torches and pitchforks to go put an end to the nonsense. Kinda like they're doing right now with systemd. A Unix that does not implement or respect POSIX is not Unix. And if the major GNU/Linux developers wanted to try a different direction, they can. But they don't. The majority of developers want to keep Linux this way. two engineers from Red Hat want it this way, and politics are driving it's adoption rather than technical merit.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX implementations. It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. Application source portability was never absolute, not by a long shot, back when Sun and SGI and HP were still relevant to what Unix was. They all had value-add APIs, little different ways of doing things which were deliberately different from everyone else's to encourage lock-in. And even disregarding that, the BSD/SysV split was even stronger then than it is now, with heterodox APIs like STREAMS still in use. Linux and the Open Source BSDs are still different, but the standards are better-followed and the auto-configuration tools are better.
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    > It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. I understand that you're doing this out of malice, and are using "reflection" in order to make yourself feel superior, and to take me down a peg, but I do regret using that sentence in the GP. The rest of the post was completely accurate, and that sentence diminished it. However, I'll have to disagree with the rest of your reply; The BSD/SysV split, while large, is fairly comparable to what's going on today with systemd. Poettering has made his contempt for *BSD very clear multiple times, and is actively trying to extinguish compatibility with it. GNOME needs massive work to play nice with any BSD now, thanks to Lennart. Porting between SunOS/IRIX/HP-UX was far less work than GNOME now requires.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Academically I agree. But practically, Unix is a fractured mirror of mostly-similar OSs. Adding one more is what everybody always does. Even POSIX was supposed to be some unifying thing, but its fractured too.

anonbanker 12y ago
So how can we strengthen POSIX so that all the fractures/forks can merge again on one target?
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Then we would have ... one more version of POSIX.
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    Perhaps a contract from all alternative implementations to abandon their individual forks and work on the "one true POSIX" would solve this, so it doesn't go into XKCD land?
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      If you were a Jedi and your mind were stronger than everybody, maybe that would work. But folks can fork things any time they like, and they do.
      - anonbanker 12y ago
        I think what I'm trying to ask is, has any successfully merged forked projects? What would be required to reconcile everyone's issues enough to make everyone work on one codebase?
        JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Not sure anyone involved wants to. There was an effort marketed as "Unify Unix" or some such. Sun, Hp, somebody else were the founding partners. Much hoopla. One the day they were supposed to be done, each founding partner announced their own branded, extended version of Unix that was better than the unified version. You know, so they could out-sell their competition. End result: 3 more versions of Unix.

anonbanker 12y ago

It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. What made unices popular was their ubiquitousness. If you had a BSD machine on the same network as a Linux or SunOS machine, they can communicate using standard protocols. Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX implementations. The Unix Way is to have small programs that do one thing extremely well; when an application (with the exception of emacs) starts emulating Zawinski's Law, they're usually broken up into smaller pieces. I do not want one app that handles cd, ls, pwd, rm, mv, etc. I suspect that if Poettering/Sievers released an app (let's call it "fileD") that did exactly that, the Unix community would gather the torches and pitchforks to go put an end to the nonsense. Kinda like they're doing right now with systemd. A Unix that does not implement or respect POSIX is not Unix. And if the major GNU/Linux developers wanted to try a different direction, they can. But they don't. The majority of developers want to keep Linux this way. two engineers from Red Hat want it this way, and politics are driving it's adoption rather than technical merit.

cbd1984 12y ago
> Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX implementations. It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. Application source portability was never absolute, not by a long shot, back when Sun and SGI and HP were still relevant to what Unix was. They all had value-add APIs, little different ways of doing things which were deliberately different from everyone else's to encourage lock-in. And even disregarding that, the BSD/SysV split was even stronger then than it is now, with heterodox APIs like STREAMS still in use. Linux and the Open Source BSDs are still different, but the standards are better-followed and the auto-configuration tools are better.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  > It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. I understand that you're doing this out of malice, and are using "reflection" in order to make yourself feel superior, and to take me down a peg, but I do regret using that sentence in the GP. The rest of the post was completely accurate, and that sentence diminished it. However, I'll have to disagree with the rest of your reply; The BSD/SysV split, while large, is fairly comparable to what's going on today with systemd. Poettering has made his contempt for *BSD very clear multiple times, and is actively trying to extinguish compatibility with it. GNOME needs massive work to play nice with any BSD now, thanks to Lennart. Porting between SunOS/IRIX/HP-UX was far less work than GNOME now requires.