att & osf

[Brandon S. Allbery]

As quoted from <268 at quintus.UUCP> by ok at quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe):
+---------------
| In article <12118 at ncoast.UUCP> allbery at ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
| >As quoted from <258 at quintus.UUCP> by ok at quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe):
| > To summarize:  the SVID is good news for applications developers.
| > AT&T _could_ ADD enormous chunks to the SVID without warning
| > and that was Henry Spencer's original point.
| >A few years ago, people were bitching about the System V standard because it
| >didn't include networking.  Now they're bitching because there's a mechanism
| >for adding such missing pieces?!
| 
| My posting was a reply to ..... someone from AT&T who denied that the SVID
| had ever changed,
+---------------

Did we read the same messages?  The "someone from AT&T" NEVER asserted that
the SVID had not changed!  He said that it had been *expanded* -- which is
exactly what I'm talking about and what is *necessary* if Unix is not to die.

+---------------
| and that poster thought he was refuting Henry Spencer's
| claim that the SVID was not as stable and multilaterally controlled a
| standard as POSIX will be.
+---------------

Frankly, POSIX is liable to be *too* stable.  How often have you used pure
ANSI Standard Pascal?  How about ANSI Fortran?  It is notable that the
*effective* standard for Fortran has always been set by a single company
(IBM), and that Pascal (which has no such backing) effectively has no
standards at all.

+---------------
| As for bitching about networking, I've read the relevant V.3 manuals
| several times, and, well, does anyone know of anything printed in English
| that explains V.3 networking?
+---------------

Before anyone answers that, let's make sure it's a real issue:  is there
anything printed in English which explains BSD networking?  (I.e. if there
is, the point is valid, but if not then why does it matter?)

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, uunet!marque!ncoast!allbery			DELPHI: ALLBERY
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