POSIX bashing

[Chris Ott]

Oh well, someday I hope to post an article that's useful to someone, but
for now, I guess I'm just going to have to be satisfied with complaining
about the general state of things.

In article <1991Mar30.202637.8629 at kithrup.COM>,  sef at kithrup.COM
(Sean Eric Fagan) claims:
> (Yes, sco does listen and look at the bug reports!)

Hmm... I find this hard to believe, considering the amount of stuff that
was left out of SCO UNIX. For example:

  1) Symbolic links. C'mon guys, how hard can this be to implement?

  2) Reasonably long filenames. Yes, I know 14 characters is "standard"
     System V, but gimme a break. I don't think you need to go all out
     and allow 255 characters like BSD, but you've added extenstions
     anyway. At least allow 30 or 40 characters.

  3) SCO UNIX does not have a real C compiler. Aside from some pretty
     basic C constructs that it doesn't accept, it doesn't even produce
     COFF output files. It produces Xenix output files, and runs a
     program (cvtomf?) to convert them to COFF format. This wouldn't
     be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that I often get the message
     "Too many modules" or something. Arrgh. In fact, after looking
     around the system, we've decided that a large number of the
     utilities have actually been copied straight from Xenix, since
     most of them are Xenix object files.
 
  4) Also, don't try to defend yourself by saying that you're trying to
     be "standard" System V. The thing that gets me the most is that
     SCO UNIX has all these extensions, when the basic stuff isn't all
     there. That should have been taken care of first. The extensions
     shoudn't have been added until afterwards.  As an example, I was
     unable to compile GCC on SCO UNIX; I had to compile it on a Prime
     EXL (which compiled it using the same configuration without so much
     as a warning message, incidently) and copy the binary over to the
     SCO machine.

There are plenty of other problems; these are just the ones I could
think of off the top of my head.  I can't believe that I'm the only
person who wants these capabilities. I'm probably not even in the
minority, so, if SCO really does listen to their customers, why aren't
they in there?

-- 
===============================================================================
Chris Ott                      | Infatuation is blind, not love.  A person
Information Management Systems | in love can see the other's faults, but
...!uunet!bria!imsdx3!chris    | loves them anyway.