Bart Smaalders <bart.smaalders at sun.com> wrote:
> You mean like an editor that won't work on terminals wider than
> 160 characters? (that was Sun's vi until S10)... you mean like a version
> of awk that breaks if the lines are longer than (gasp) 255 characters?
> Like a packaging system that cannot handle installing dependencies?
> Like a clustering software subsystem that effectively disables use of
> all /proc tools on certain critical cluster processes?
vi is not the worst example for Solaris.
There are commands that do not compile without compiler warnings, there
are many tools that have been compiled without function protytypes in the
internal include files. If you add then prototypesm the software would not
compile anymore at all because of incorrect calling parameters. The commands
have not even all been checked for 64 bit correctness. As an example: execl*()
call parameters are not closed with a null pointer but only with a null
constant that results in a 32 bit NULL only...
What you see is a result of the development method used for OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris development is currently locally event driven (a single event only
causes work on a single utility). It should be globally event driven (a single
event should result in a global code inspection).
If the person who did make /usr/bin/diff work with any line length did also
check all other sources, then we had a awk that works with infinite line length
too.
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
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