POSIX bashing

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <BZS.91Mar29171508 at world.std.com> bzs at world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>But the idea of "anyone with budget to show up at a standards
>committee meeting" reengineering anything is a horrid thought.

Oh, I quite agree.  Unfortunately, there was a lot of pressure from
those like the one to whom I was originally responding, who felt that
POSIX.1 simply HAD to specify BSD-like "job control" facilities.  I
wanted them omitted.  The compromise was to try to fix the major
problems and make the feature "optional".  (Of course, NIST went
ahead and mandated it in the FIPS.  They always seem to think they
know better than the technical committees who develop the standards.)

I have heard criticism of the POSIX style of job control also, as
broken although in a different way from BSD's.  I will say that I
have NEVER gotten my (actually, Ron Natalie's) job-control Bourne
shell to work 100% under ANY flavor of job control, due to occasional
races and other problems involving interactions between the terminal
handler, kernel security features, and process groups.  Then there is
the vhangup() kludge, which was deemed by P1003 as inappropriate in a
System V-based implementation.

>This sort of behavior is what dooms all these standards efforts. They
>should be outlawed, the whole thing is sincerely idiotic.

There is indeed a serious problem with most of the UNIX-related
software standardization work these days.  There seem to be a large
number of people who think that simply HAVING a standard is somehow
a desirable goal, quite apart from whether or not it is a good standard.
Unfortunately such people are quite willing to go through all the effort
to promulgate their point of view and get standards actually adopted,
and once they start work there is no stopping them.