21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
5:20 a.m.
On Mon, 20 Feb 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
As far as stability and portability is concerned, GNU
is a disaster.
Even when a feature is the same across different architectures the
option names and values are often different. In one company I worked for
we had two releases nearly derailed because of Linux/GCC issues. In one
case, the way locales worked was different between different versions of
Linux. In another case, GCC simply silently removed an option that we
depended on and we nearly shipped a product that would have bombed out
if the user had already upgraded to the newest GCC.
I'm no fan of GNU either, and have long considered doing a GNU-less,
SysV-flavored Linux distribution as a reaction to all things that annoy me
about GNU.
In terms of following the Unix philosophy, the widow
managers on Linux
are getting more bizarre by the year. Hitting a key at random by
mistake can cause windows to disappear, screens of unknown utility to
appear, everything to disappear, etc. Setting options to try to achieve
some kind of consistency is totally different in each system. Etc.
etc. There seems to be no larger organizing principle at work...
Which is probably truer than you realize.
-uso.