POSIX bashing (Was Re: Retaining file permissions)

[The Grey Wolf]

<21795 at yunexus.YorkU.CA> by oz at yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
& In article <see ref> jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
&
& >	      ... one thing I consider broken about POSIX is that there's no
& >st_blocks field in its stat structure; more generally, there is no standard
& >way in POSIX to find out how much space a file actually occupies on the disk
& > ...
& 
& Interesting consideration, though I fail to see why this amounts to POSIX
& being broken. I take ``broken'' to mean internally inconsistent, or simply
& erroneous, and instead you present your views on something that is not a
& part of the standard [along with many other things] and is yet to be shown
& indispensible within the its scope. If a strong argument could be made for
& such a thing, that would make POSIX incomplete, [which may, as often
& happens with other standards, be completed via implementation agreements
& or other supplements] but not necessarily broken.

Incompleteness, in many ways, is congruent to brokenness.  "Well, in the
future, we want it to deal with that problem, but for now it doesn't ad-
dress it." is synonymous with "Well, it's broken."

I think that POSIX is an attempt at an implementation of a bare-bones OS.
There are too many things there which are simply done wrong.  I agree with
Jon on this one.

Of course, one could argue that a standard should not try to define too
much...but I think POSIX purposely decided to look more like System V and
ignore all the interesting bits that made BSD better.  Why, I'm not sure.

It's truly a pity that System V has more marketing clout; BSD is just SO
much more usable.

& 
& Let me ask again: what is it that you know to be broken?
&

See above.  Incompleteness ,', Brokenness.

& oz
& ---
& We only know ... what we know, and    |   Internet: oz at nexus.yorku.ca 
& that is very little. -- Dan Rather    |   UUCP: utzoo/utai!yunexus!oz


-- 
# On the 'Net:  Why are more and more fourth-level wizard(-wannabe)s trying
# to invoke ninth-level magic instead of taking the time to climb the other
# (quite essential) thirteen or fourteen levels so they can do this properly?
# ...!{uunet,ucbvax}!unisoft!greywolf