[Lynx-dev] Re: Standards compliance..? (Was Re: non-pkgsrc emacs or clone)

[Marc Tooley]

On Wednesday 25 May 2005 08:59, Todd Vierling wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > > (In more recent version branches of NetBSD and other OS's, system
> > > .h files have become progrssively more strict about standards
> > > conformance.
> >
> > There must be something nice I could find to say about NetBSD's
> > header, but offhand, all I can recall are their problems
> > (incomplete,
>
> Hm, can you say "standards conformance" again?
>
> Please keep your (likely Linux-advocacy based) flamebait at home. 
> The rest of us are working with third party software quite
> successfully on NetBSD, and it's unfortunate that you feel the need
> to have an unfounded temper tantrum about it.

I'm pretty sure there was a NetBSD commit to fix mkdir() (and other 
calls) so they worked with a trailing slash, in violation of the Single 
UNIX Standard which states that all trailing slashes must be 
interpreted as "/." everywhere. Many applications made assumptions 
about it apparently, because it "just worked" on so many other 
platforms.

I seem to recall the reasoning was that the OS should be written to 
accommodate applications and application developers, and not the other 
way around, and was partially driven by the need to get Linux emulation 
to work with Linux applications that used the trailing slash in 
emulated mkdir() calls.

No offence of course, on either side. I suppose I'm just interested in 
consistency across the board. We should all get along, I say! What 
would it break to fix it either in headers or in the third-party 
project? Probably nothing. Don't let ego stand in the way of progress. 
=]