On Thu, 26 May 2005, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> > It's not a workaround, if it's necessary in order to follow standards in
> > your application.  As various Unix-like OS's become more standardized, and
> > they are, like it or not, things like Linux are staying out in the cold and
> > shield unsuspecting software authors from the reality of the heterogeneous
> > world.  (There's a reason I've asserted on many occasions that "GNU & Linux
> > help to promote sloppy code.")
>
> frankly, making comments like that (and accusing me of it), makes your
> opinions not very useful.  Try to be (at least) a little objective.

That is being objective.  Note my references to a heterogeneous [OS] world
-- my work, nonprofit work, and home network make up a very diverse set of
platforms I use on a daily basis.  Including Linux.

I have years of experience to back up these assertions, as do many of my
peers who have posited the same.  It's certainly not unfounded to point out
how some OS's (Linux being a shining example, but not the only one) are
allowing programmers to take too many shortcuts around standards, leading to
quite unportable and often unmanageable code.  (It gets much worse, of
course, if something like autoconf is not used.  Many times, even
autoconfiscated projects start out as very "Linuxish" and require adding
quite a few autoconf checks to make the code work on other platforms.)

This is not a problem that shows up on only NetBSD.  I have been through
hundreds of "add missing #include, fix #ifdef, fix .SUFFIXES rule, etc."
cycles on source trees whose maintainers use only Linux, on at least five
different non-Linux platforms.  This stands in stark contrast to sources
maintained on a BSD, or a SVR4 descendant (such as Solaris or UnixWare),
which, modulo full OS feature differences, are much more likely to be
portable across OS's.  Heck, even sources maintained on oddball Unix-like
implementations such as Digital Unix (nee OSF/1), AIX, and IRIX lean towards
more portable.

So please go troll bait somewhere else.  I'm losing my appetite.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>