Xah Lee's Unixism

[Alan Balmer]

On Thu, 02 Sep 2004 20:58:34 -0000, "David K. Wall"
<dwall at fastmail.fm> wrote:

>Alan Balmer <albalmer at att.net> wrote in message
><news:9pqej0tjtikajsa74c7a5el7quk49k053s at 4ax.com>: 
>
>> On Thu, 02 Sep 2004 20:32:09 +0200, "John Thingstad"
>><john.thingstad at chello.no> wrote:
>
>>>I feel compelled to replay that Linux is based on the Posix
>>>standard which is basically a recipie for writing unix. They did
>>>not write a new operating system. They implemented a tested and
>>>proven one. 
>
>> Huh? Linux is only recently paying some attention to the POSIX
>> standards. 
>
>Linus deliberately tried to pay attention to the POSIX standard
>almost as soon as he realized that his terminal emulator project
>was turning into an OS. 1991 isn't all that long ago, but I'm 
>not sure I would refer to it as "recent" in this context.
>
>http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991Jul3.100050.9886%40klaava.Helsinki.FI

I don't know that the "interest" he expresses in this post proves the
point ;-) However, Linux was based on Minix, and I think Minix was
POSIX.2 compliant. 

Actually, what I'm remembering is a few years ago, when I was querying
a allegedly expert Linux developer. The question was, roughly, "Is
Linux POSIX-compliant." and the answer was, roughly, "Not very."
However, I seem to remember that we were talking POSIX.4 at the time.
Many systems don't yet support all of dot-4. I haven't looked at the
headers of my latest Linux install to see what sections are
implemented - I'll try to do that tonight.

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting John Thingstad's remarks, but I was mostly
objecting to the idea that Linus sat down with a copy of the POSIX
specifications and turned them into an OS. (Especially since not all
of the current POSIX standards existed at the time :-)

-- 
Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
removebalmerconsultingthis at att.net