Standards Update, IEEE 1003.4: Real-time Extensions

[Chip Salzenberg]

From:  chip at tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg)

According to fouts at bozeman.bozeman.ingr (Martin Fouts):
>I'm not sure which Unix you've been running for the past five or more
>years, but a lot of stuff doesn't live in the file system name space ...

The absense of sockets (except UNIX domain), System V IPC, etc. from
the file system is, in the opinion of many, a bug.  It is a result of
Unix being extended by people who do not understand Unix.

Research Unix, which is the result of continued development by the
creators of Unix, did not take things out of the filesystem.  To the
contrary, it put *more* things there, including processes (via the
/proc pseudo-directory).

It is true that other operating systems get along without devices,
IPC, etc. in their filesystems.  That's fine for them; but it's not
relevant to Unix.  Unix programming has a history of relying on the
filesystem to take care of things that other systems handle as special
cases -- devices, for example.  The idea that devices can be files but
TCP/IP sockets cannot runs counter to all Unix experience.

The reason why I continue this discussion here, in comp.std.unix, is
that many Unix programmers hope that the people in the standardization
committees have learned from the out-of-filesystem mistake, and will
rectify it.
-- 
Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT     <chip at tct.uucp>, <uunet!pdn!tct!chip>

Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 89