[rescue] SGI Indigo2 & IRIX 6.5

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008, der Mouse wrote:

>> And, yes, the header files are in different spots.  The various
>> standards say that's okay.
>
> The standards are wrong.  Unless your metric of goodness is just
> conformance to the standards.

It depends.  The C standard header files are in /usr/include, and the
POSIX/SUS standard header files are where they belong.  Things like X11
and OpenGL and Motif are vendor-specific.

> Of course, this brings it to a question of what you want to be
> compatible with.  That's a reasonable point of discussion; my point at
> the moment is that saying that everything conforming to the standards is
> equally correct is simply _wrong_.

Why is one implementation better than the other?  Do you really -care- if
some header file included three levels deep from sys/time.sh is in
/usr/include/machdep or /usr/include/machine or
/usr/src/sys/include/platform or whatever?

>> There's no reason not to support "proprietary" UNIX.
>
> There certainly is for me, as a software author.  I have no interest in
> supporting anything not open-source.  This is partly pragmatic (it's a
> lot easier to support stuff I run myself, and that does not and will
> not include anything closed-source) and partly political (doing my part
> to exert evolutionary pressure against closed source).

If a given piece of software is so shoddy that it can only run on one or
two implementations of POSIX, barring some low-level dependency (a device
driver), it's broken software.  If it can run on Linux and it can run on
BSD, there are very few technical reason why it can't run elsewhere.

Political reasons are another matter entirely.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke < "There is great satisfaction in building good tools
Elgin, TX          > for other people to use."
USA               <                                     --Freeman Dyson