POSIX bashing

Doug Gwyn gwyn at smoke.brl.mil
Wed Apr 3 10:51:19 AEST 1991


In article <670533623.5140 at mindcraft.com> karish at mindcraft.com (Chuck Karish) writes:
>In article <15645 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>(Of course, NIST went ahead and mandated [ that the POSIX.1 job control
>>option be supported ] in the FIPS.  They always seem to think they
>>know better than the technical committees who develop the standards.)
>Customers are such an annoyance.  They're always demanding things
>that the implementors don't think they should have.

Nonsense -- NIST/NBS claimed to be representing Federal UNIX users,
but what they actually did was prepare a poll on the optional features
which a SMALL number of users got to vote on at a workshop, then
mandated the items that received majority votes, no matter how ill-
advised it might be to mandate the specific features for SOME
procurements, and even without concern over whether the particular
combination of features was an intelligent packaging.  This is the
common selection of true "democracy" over "representative republic"
that is uncritically accepted by many Americans these days as desirable.
(The Founding Fathers were aware of the problems with true democracies,
which is why they tried not to establish one.)

In fact, as a Federal UNIX user of some note I much prefer to NOT have
POSIX-style job control forced upon me, as it makes it less likely
that I will be able to acquire better solutions that might not be
compatible with such features.



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