Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!usenix!jsq
From: rja7m@plaid.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.unix
Subject: Re: Standards Update, IEEE 1003.4: Real-time Extensions
Message-ID: <552@usenix.ORG>
Date: 27 Sep 90 12:55:49 GMT
References: <523@usenix.ORG> <539@usenix.ORG> <541@usenix.ORG> <545@usenix.ORG>
Sender: jsq@usenix.ORG
Reply-To: randall@Virginia.EDU (Randall Atkinson)
Organization: University of Virginia
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Submitted-by: rja7m@plaid.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson)

In article <545@usenix.ORG> ske@pkmab.se (Kristoffer Eriksson) writes:

>What prevents us from inventing a few additional filesystem operations
>that ARE general enough?

PLEASE.  Let's don't go off inventing new things as part of a standards
effort.  The proper way to approach standardisation is to standardise
the existing practice and avoid all new inventions that haven't been
fully implemented and tested widely.  Many of the problems with UNIX-derived
OSs have come from folks who didn't do this and ended up with stuff that
wasn't really compatible with the rest of the OS in function or approach.

A lot of the problems I see coming out of the working groups in P1003
come from folks failing to standardise existing practice and instead
going off and inventing a new idea in the committee that hasn't been
implemented and lacks adequate actual experience with whether the idea
really works and is a general solution to a real problem.  

  Randall Atkinson
  randall@Virginia.EDU

Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 140