Summary of responses to file allocation, plea for changes in Unix

[Barry Margolin]

In article <2387 at nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu> karl-d at nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Doug Karl) writes:
>How do I get the Unix software design engineers and standards community to
>consider modifying future releases of Unix of all flavors to allocate files?

1) Join the appropriate standards committee and propose the feature, and
try to get it adopted.  Standards committees are open to anyone to join.
The hard part is convincing the standards committee that a feature that no
Unix system has is necessary for a Unix standard.

2) Contact Unix vendors directly and request the feature.  You'll have to
convince them that adding such a feature will increase their business.

If approach (2) succeeds with a few vendors then approach (1) has a better
chance of succeeding.  Standards committees prefer to adopt features from
existing implementations than to innovate by themselves.  However, if the
feature should be easy to add to most implementations of the standard, or
is incredibly obviously necessary, then it sometimes isn't too hard to push
through the standards committee without a working example.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
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