You're running a system largely written in C/C++ on (most likely) x86 systems; programming languages with compatibility back to the early 1970s on chips with compatibility back to the early 1970s. Backwards compatibility is a huge winner and breaking old code so bad that Linux is bound to being backwardly compatible.
Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:09 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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We don't need to be backwards-incompatible. It's fine to have POSIX compat layer and API, but it's a good time to start developing a new API.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:14 UTC (Sun) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
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Don't let us stop you.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:21 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
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There's always impedence mismatches. VMS's POSIX always had serious problems because VMS is not Unix. A program that doesn't know about the filesystem versioning can't do the right thing about it. If you start from the POSIX level, you have a hard time introducing features like that in the first place, because nothing will handle them correct.
I believe that file names should be valid strings of Unicode characters. But if you do that, there's going to be edge problems where POSIX programs can't access certain files, can't create certain files for reasons inexplicable to them, or the POSIX filename-native filename mapping is confusing. The question is going to be is it worth it?
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:23 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Mac OS X shows that enforcing UTF-8 (and normalizing filenames) is totally fine for all real-world practical purposes.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:25 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
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the ash-heap of history is littered by companies and organizations that have decided that everyone else was wrong, and they knew better and could design such a great system that everyone else would abandon what they use to jump on board.
You act as if the POSIX (and Single Unix Specification) standard is something handed down from on high that hasn't changed in 20 years.
The last revision to POSIX and SUS took place within the last couple of years, and the next one will take place within the next few years.
These standards work by looking at the things that people are developing, and getting consensus between the different developers as to what they can agree on, They then have those developers go and implement what they are proposing, and it only gets into the standard after there are running implementations.
by definition this means that they encourage new, non-standard, things to be developed and deployed (they can't add something to the standard if it hasn't been deployed yet)
The problem isn't with the idea of enhancing things, it's with the idea that standards don't matter, nobody else matters, only develop for yourself and to #$% with everyone else.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:31 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
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The ashheap of history is littered with *nix companies. And Microsoft is still out there. History's statement on the matter tells me that you've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to run. Neither standards nor standard-free innovation is a guarantee of anything.
90% of companies and organizations fail quickly no matter what they do.
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Posted Jan 21, 2013 23:13 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
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So this kind of rant is offtopic in more ways than one...
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Posted Jan 22, 2013 17:51 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
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And windows has one of my favorite error codes/constant names!
ERROR_SUCCESS, of course :)
-stu
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Posted Jan 23, 2013 0:36 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
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... possibly brought by the same people who gave us the Start->Shut Down menu item.
PS: I thought Windows 7 got rid of the "Start" name but I just found it is still showing as a tooltip.
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Posted Jan 24, 2013 11:19 UTC (Thu) by sorokin (subscriber, #88478)
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No. Since introduction of COM it uses IErrorInfo in addition to HRESULT.
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Posted Jan 30, 2013 5:53 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
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COM is a userspace thing, similar to DBus or CORBA. We are discussing kernel APIs here.
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Posted Jan 30, 2013 7:33 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Not really, COM is also used in kernel. IErrorInfo also supports marshalling across processes.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 1:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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> the ash-heap of history is littered by companies and organizations that have decided that everyone else was wrong, and they knew better and could design such a great system that everyone else would abandon what they use to jump on board.
And with even more companies that decided to "stick to standards" and stop innovating (e.g. basically all commercial UNIX vendors).
> You act as if the POSIX (and Single Unix Specification) standard is something handed down from on high that hasn't changed in 20 years.
Yep. Not much has changed in important areas, changes are mostly cosmetic (and yes, we've actually paid for copies of official POSIX standards).
For example, my another pet peeve - signals are useless for library writers because there's no mechanism to allocate/reserve them or to pass parameters to a signal handler.
> The last revision to POSIX and SUS took place within the last couple of years, and the next one will take place within the next few years.
Will it include cgroups, namespaces, kqueue? No?
> The problem isn't with the idea of enhancing things, it's with the idea that standards don't matter, nobody else matters, only develop for yourself and to #$% with everyone else.
And yet, the recent history shows us that this very attitude works. Most "community projects" end up dead after extensive bike-shedding flamewars.
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Posted Jan 20, 2013 14:17 UTC (Sun) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435)
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> For example, my another pet peeve - signals are useless for library
> writers because there's no mechanism to allocate/reserve them or to pass
> parameters to a signal handler.
You may wish to look into sigaction(SA_SIGINFO) and sigqueue() used with POSIX.1b real-time signals... That at least solves your second issue... As for your first, I'd think just using sigaction() to peek at the current handler would tell you if a signal is currently already in use or not...