Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: (C News) limit filesize and inews
Message-ID: <1991Jan6.004313.8792@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1991Jan3.214226.9184@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991Jan4.115409.741@robobar.co.uk> <1991Jan4.202944.7348@zoo.toronto.edu> <3461@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 91 00:43:13 GMT

In article <3461@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber) writes:
>>I balk at massive contortions in our code to work around system bugs
>>like this.
>
>Better be careful, Henry. If you don't cope with flaws in the systems 
>you run on, you may find that the code you write won't run at all.

Note the word "massive".  Small changes to increase portability are no
big thing, but we reserve the right to set limits, and say that a system
which goes beyond said limits is the user's problem.  The set of capabilities
dependably present on *all* Unixoid systems is very nearly empty.  The power
of your programming environment increases radically if you are willing to
change "all" to "most".

In practice, anyone developing or maintaining portable software has to set
limits like this.  There is always a system, somewhere, so broken that
your software will refuse to run on it unless you undertake hideous
contortions.

Bear in mind that we don't get paid for this.  That being the case, the
time we have to spend on it is quite small.  Our to-do lists are full to
overflowing with ideas that would benefit much larger numbers of users
and would be less of a pain to implement.

>To take the ivory tower attitude that the end-user should get the OS fixed
>it commendable, but not always reasonable.

It is both reasonable and necessary in certain cases, unless you have
unlimited time to spend and don't care about the impact on future maintenance.
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry