Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hpda!hpcupt1!hpisod2!decot
From: decot@hpisod2.HP.COM (Dave Decot)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: More Questions about Sun OS/ATT Merged UNIX.
Message-ID: <14020014@hpisod2.HP.COM>
Date: 5 Mar 88 02:10:09 GMT
References: <1742@quacky.mips.COM>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 34

> I hope that this _not_ what Sun is going to do.  Why?  Because it perpetuates
> the problem, rather than attempt a solution.  What really needs to be done is
> to have some smart (set of) person(s) take a long hard look at both kernels
> and boths sets of command trees.  They should come up with a list of items
> that are
> 
>     a) syntactically and semantically the same (i.e., ARE the same)
>     b) syntactically different but semantically the same
>     c) syntactically the same but semantically different (these exist)
>     d) syntactically and semantically different
> 
> and resolve the differences.

This is what POSIX and X/Open are trying to do at the moment.

> Once you've done that you have similar semantics and it's just
> a question of deciding which are ``best'' and committing to them and
> providing a compat lib for loose ends.  

You have just described HP-UX 2.0.

HP-UX conforms to SVID (except NSE, at the moment), and includes job control,
select, interval high-resolution timers, process/data memory locking,
ksh, shell layers, RCS, X, ARPA/BSD networking, preemptable kernel,
"contiguous" files, BSD-style fast file system, symbolic links, long
file names, multiple group IDs per process, NFS, SIGIO, and lots of
non-SVID System V stuff.  All in a system that passes the SVVS.

You get System V and non-conflicting BSD stuff by default;  if you want
the BSD version of a something that conflicts (a "loose end"), you just
link in an extra library.

Dave Decot
hpda!decot