Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hpfcso!hpfcdc!koren
From: koren@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Steve Koren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: POSIX AmigaOS (Re: AmigaOS/UNIX - A Suggestion)
Message-ID: <11640024@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Date: 26 Oct 90 13:57:18 GMT
References: <6874@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Organization: HP Fort Collins, Co.
Lines: 30


> I don't see why. You can set the MMU up so the UNIX tasks are read-only, and
> have read-only access to the rest of the system.

> More of a problem is that GURUs are scary for UNIX folks.

> More interesting would be to consider how hard it would be for Commodore to
> make AmigaOS POSIX compliant. The only hard part is the fork, and if you
> restrict POSIX compliant programs to a set of calls to a resource-tracking
> shared library then that would be solvable. In fact posix.library could be

There are a couple of issues here.  First of all, making Commodore's Un*x
POSIX compliant is definately within the realm of possibility.  After all,
it is a Un*x.

As for making AmigaDos POSIX compliant, which part of your post seems to
imply, this is not trivial.  There is more to POSIX than the library calls
which could be defined in a shared library.  That is simply POSIX.1.  There
is also POSIX.2 and POSIX.2a.  Right now, AmigaDos has pretty much none
of the stuff necessary for either .2 or .2a.  It would be lots and lots
of work to get this stuff running, and it would introduce many other
problems like dramatically increasing the size of the AmigaDos distribution.
It is not impossible, of course.  But at the point when you have POSIX
compliance for .1, .2, and .2a, then you basically have the complexity
of a Un*x system and have to deal with it accordingly.  I guess you could
just ignore .2 and .2a completely...

(Also, neither .2 or .2a is really stable yet.)

 - steve