Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!hsdndev!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: file attributes
Message-ID: <15826.Jun2407.00.5591@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 24 Jun 91 07:00:55 GMT
References: <1780@sranha.sra.co.jp>
Organization: IR
Lines: 23

In article <1780@sranha.sra.co.jp> erik@srava.sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel) writes:
> Exactly. I have no hidden agendas here, so let me spell it out. One of
> my aims is to get something like this into POSIX. This way, many
> vendors will feel obliged to support it.

I find this attitude sickening. Where there is no implementation there
should never be a standard. If enough vendors see the value of a feature
or (equivalently) believe that the market demands that feature, that
feature becomes a de facto standard. The other direction is exemplified
by POSIX: rather than waiting to see what consensus appears in the real
world, a bunch of people sit down, define interfaces to operations that
they've hardly even used and that at most one vendor supports, and call
the result a ``standard.'' Before the people working on *good* solutions
to the same problems have a chance to test their ideas, they find an
overspecified yet woefully incomplete ``standard'' shoved down their
throats. Fortunately, there are a few parts of POSIX actually based on
the real world rather than somebody's imagination. Now if only the
people ``standardizing'' asynchronous I/O and threads and high-level
network applications would stop gloating over how much power they think
they have and start paying some attention to reality, the rest of us
might just get some work done.

---Dan