Alexandre Oliva wrote:
I look at at this way: a unix-like operating system is the part that
makes everything look like a file and applications that are portable
across them only need an API of creat(), open(), read(), write(), and
ioctl()
API = UNIX-like C library? On GNU+Linux, GNU libc, right? Linux per
se offers no such APIs.
In the original design, the things in section 2 of the manual (fork(),
open(), pipe(), etc.) were system calls and thus by definition what the
operating system does. Now everything is stubbed into the c library so
it is harder to tell the difference unless you look at the man section
number that documents the function.
Nothing like "many small programs, each doing a single simple task
very well, that can be combined through pipes and a powerful shell
programming language" would be part of the UNIX philosophy, because,
well, these small programs wouldn't be part of UNIX per this narrow
definition.
That's a good idea under any OS, not particularly unique to unix.
Heh. Discarding part of a statement to make it fit others isn't very
nice :-) Good ideas are present in any OS, so... whatever conclusion
you might want to get to :-)
The philosophy is loosely associated with unix and aided by it's ability
to fork fairly lightweight processes, but really isn't specific to
anything, much less whether something is GNU-ish or not. Emacs, the
very first GNU program, was probably the thing most widely accused of
straying from the 'small program that does one thing' concept in its
day. (Actually, I think emacs goes back farther than unix, but my
memory is a little fuzzy that far back).
The c library isn't unique to unix by design.
I don't understand what you're trying to communicate here, there are
several different possible interpretations. Please expand or use
different words?
We've strayed from GNU vs. not-GNU into unix vs. not-unix, but the point
of unix-like operating systems is to hide the differences among
processor types and i/o devices and present the system calls as
described in section 2 of the manual regardless of the hardware - and to
do some special stuff in process id 1 which is the only one not created
by fork() with inherited file descriptors. The point of the standard c
library is to hide the differences among operating systems.
But back to GNU vs. not-GNU. There is a GNU operating system. Nobody
uses it and there are reasons for that. Instead of fixing those
reasons, they want to tack their name onto the distributions that people
do use because some portable applications from their set are often
included. For reasons I've already covered, I'd rather see distributions
minimize the GPL-encumbered code and use things from the *bsd or
opensolaris projects instead - except for gcc which I don't think has a
less restricted counterpart. Then the GNU project could just go its own
way in the isolation the GPL demands while the rest of the world
cooperates and interoperates at the component level.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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