On Sun, Sep 07, 2003, burns wrote: >On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 11:20, Collins Richey wrote: >> >> Maybe you should widen your field of vision. > >The problem is, my field of vision *is* much wider - wider than OS >software. This really is one of the major limitations to the acceptance >of open source solutions by leading system integrators and IT service >companies. Thus the reason for my rant.
Add my vote to your rant. I've been bitching about this ever since AT&T changed the option for grep to ignore case from ``-y'' to ``-i'' (yes it may make more sense, but it broke existing scripts and one has to read the man pages in any case). I think backwards compatibility problems may be worse on Linux than it is on FreeBSD, but that's only a gut feeling unsubstantiated by facts. I've often thought that the people making gratuitous changes like this are either young and inexperienced or perhaps bureaucrats who don't care what it costs to make changes in working programs in reaction to their whims. ... >For Linux to be accepted across the board, major issues such as this >need to be addressed. It's OK for small boutique software offerings. But >if Linux wants to play seriously at the enterprise level, there is a >certain amount of discipline that will have to be adopted by the >community. I don't think it's as bad as Windows, at least at the system call level. David Korn made a presentation to the Seattle Unix group a couple of years ago talking about development of uwin, a Unix environment for Windows. He pointed out that one of their biggest problems was Windows systems calls where the API differed between different versions of Windows, and even within different patch levels in the same version. The same system call might have different arguments and/or return values. Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved. -- R.A. Heinlein _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
