Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!bionet!agate!shelby!portia!forel!karish From: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me) Summary: Portability Message-ID: <4799@portia.Stanford.EDU> Date: 24 Aug 89 15:15:15 GMT References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp> <1894@ucsd.EDU> <1989Aug13.071802.5187@utzoo.uucp> <527@logicon.arpa> <9636@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> <1989Aug16.182527.24840@utzoo.uucp> <47046@oliveb.olivetti.com> Sender: USENET News System Reply-To: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) Organization: Mindcraft, Inc. Lines: 38 In article <47046@oliveb.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) wrote: >In article <1989Aug16.182527.24840@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >>done properly, and so you need a way to feed that process from multiple >>sources -- this is very hard to do portably. >I am beginning to seriously wonder if writing "portable" code is a good >idea.... >What I am contemplating is totaly separate versions of code for the >major versions of Unix. That is, someone would maintain a BSD version, >someone else would maintain a SysV version, yet another an Xenix >version, etc.... >But lack of portability >should not hold back all the versions. It doesn't hold back all the versions now. Henry's article, quoted above, was an invitation for someone else to implement a feature that might only be useful for some systems. >Of course this means extra work because more than one version would have >to be maintained but there are certainly enough sites now to justify it. >(What the heck, we have 3 separately maintained versions already!) >On the other hand beta testing would not requre 20 carefully selected >sites so the total work might actually be less. We'd need a real standard to define a base level of compatibility. How much fun would this `My news is the One True News' discussion be with twenty principal participants instead of three? Compare the amount of effort that's necessary to maintain the kermit archives to the maintenance that news requires. Kermit works on more architectures and has to deal with more severe incompatibilities, so it's worth the trouble. Why ASK for that sort of grief with news, which could stay basically portable under the present system? Chuck Karish karish@mindcraft.com (415) 493-9000 karish@forel.stanford.edu