Re: UNIX vs. NT (was; Re: Official Linux support from Digital?)

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, Armin Ollig wrote:

> The NT Posix "subsystem" (a hack iam shure like the rest of NT) is
> almost impossible to "exploit". MS will not make any docs about it
> publicly available. Just take a look at the NT Filesystem support in

I think the POSIX support is fairly well documented (don't ask me
where...) but the biggest problem is that it is especially weak.  POSIX is
of course a suite of standards and NT implements only a sparse minimum set
of POSIX rules.  Using the POSIX subsystem also locks that application out
of other NT services that aren't POSIX-able.  For instance, I *think* you
can use the networking features (maybe not) but your app is specifically
limited to console apps.  Even something like tk is out of the question
iirc.  NT itself has a decent architecture (former OS/2 guy here...) but
while Microsoft is clamoring about their application interoperability,
that same level of interoperability doesn't really exist in the NT kernel
layout wrt pluggable system componants, specifically with POSIX support.

> I hope this thread does not end in a mess like KDE vs. Gnome some
> weeks ago.

I inadvertantly got that mess fired up.  Never again will I say that KDE
is at version 1.0 and GNOME at version 0.2 ...

> anyway. 

agreed.

--
Christopher Curtis               - http://www.ee.fit.edu/users/ccurtis
Florida Institute of Technology  - System Administrator, Programmer
Melbourne, Florida  USA          - http://www.lp.org/