Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!wasatch!utah-gr!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wsccs!dharvey
From: dharvey@wsccs.UUCP (David Harvey)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: free versions of complex software (Re: So let's talk about FSF)
Summary: But I thought we were responsible for line endings!
Message-ID: <694@wsccs.UUCP>
Date: 2 Oct 88 09:39:41 GMT
References: <780@proxftl.UUCP> <600@sering.cwi.nl> <2133@stpstn.UUCP> <492@optilink.UUCP>
Lines: 31

In article <492@optilink.UUCP>, cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
> 
> In particular, one of our people transferred a file from a Mac to a
> Sun.  Macs use a different end-line convention -- CR, not LF, and CR LF.
> This guy would do MORE FOO.C, and not only would MORE die, but it would
> make the window he was working in go away as well.  As near as we can
> tell, MORE doesn't bother to check if a line will fit into some internal
> buffer, goes off the end, and returns some code to Sun Windows that
> makes the window go away.
> 
> Yes, the problem was readily reproducible.
> 
> As much as it is going to pain a lot of you to hear this, most of what
> I've seen of UNIX software wouldn't be salable on the PC -- it isn't
> built to even the quality standards of Microsoft.
> 
> Clayton E. Cramer

If I am not mistaken, almost every communications program I am aware of
allows the user to select CR-LF -> LF, LF -> CR-LF, etc.  If the fool
isn't smart enough to check on this, he deserved what he got!  More to
the point,  don't think that PC software doesn't benefit from the
thousands (millions?) of man-hours of extra development that can be
amortized because of the sale of thousands (millions?) of extra copies.
This of course assumes you are talking of software for sale.  For
freeware, you take your chances on what you get.  My experience has been
that almost anything that was semi-portable C source (free) has compiled
easier, and run with much fewer problems under Ultrix (DEC's registered
trademark version) than under MESSY-DOS!

dharvey@wsccs