POSIX bashing

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <3446 at unisoft.UUCP> greywolf at unisoft.UUCP (The Grey Wolf) writes:
>That job control and self-resetting signal handling met with opposition is
>only a sign that the dinosaurs (people-type dinosaurs, not machines) are
>fighting a losing battle and they want everyone else to feel the wounds they
>are taking.  An interactive operating system without the capacity for
>job control is as next to useless as one can get without removing, say,
>the "minimal" tty editing functions (erase, kill, intr, quit, [d]susp
>(at least in this case)...).

People who were not involved should not presume to know what the
arguments were.  In fact, the 4.2BSD job control hack was a horrible
abomination with a large number of technical problems.  POSIX.1 had
to reengineer it just to address most of the security and other
substantive issues.  It is still widely felt that the job control
hack is one of the most inelegant parts of any UNIX variant that
has it.  Certainly there have been much better designs for facilities
that render the BSD-style hack unnecessary.