24 Jun
2024
24 Jun
'24
8:03 p.m.
On Sun, Jun 23, 2024 at 04:15:40PM -0400, Stuff Received wrote:
My opinion is that the authors simply did not have
access to other
systems or were not interested. Sometimes, one finds a disclaimer to
that effect. I understand that but I am irked when they claim POSIX
compliance.
I get irked because Posix compliance applies to OS's (a specific
binary release of the kernel plus userspace runtime environment), and
not to applications.
Also, compliance implies that it has passed a specific test process,
after paying $$$$ to a Posix Test Compliance Lab, and said compliance
certificate gets revoked the moment you fix a security bug, until you
go and you pay additional $$$ to the Posix compliance lab. Basically,
it's racket that generally only companies who need to sell into the US
or European government market were willing to play. (e.g., at one
point there were Red Hat and SuSE distributions which were POSIX
certified, but Fedora or Debian never were.)
A project or vendor could claim that there product was a "strictly
conforming POSIX application[1], but that's hard to actually prove
(which is why there is no compliance testing for it), since not only
do you have to limit yourself to only those interface guaranted to be
present by POSIX, but you must also not depend on any behavior which
specified to be "implementation defined" (and very often many
traditional Unix behaviors are technically "implementation defined",
so that VMS and Windows could claim to be be "POSIX compliant
implementation".) So a strictly POSIX conforming application was
likely only relevant for very simple "toy" applications that didn't
need to do anything fancy, like say, networking.
(Berkeley sockets couldn't be required because AT&T Streams. Oh,
joy.)
[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap02.html#ta…
Can you tell I'm a bit jaded and cynical about the whole Posix
compliance/conformance thing? :-)
Cheers,
- Ted