[Gllug] open source centric ICT in Schools from Sept 2012 ?

[Alain Williams]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:30:28PM +0000, Nix wrote:
> On 13 Jan 2012, Alain Williams spake thusly:
> > Not what I said. I said that open standards are more important than open source.
> >
> > An example of that is the definition of the Unix file system. This is an
> > API: open/close/create/readdir/... How it is implemented is, at the application
> > programming level of zero interest. This means that your application will
> > work on very different file systems: sysv, ext2, reiser, ...
> 
> Well, not quite. POSIX doesn't specify 'the Unix file system' (that
> would be BSD FFS perhaps), but rather the *programming interface* to the

Errm: that is why I said ''API'' ???

> As far as I know Unix is unique in having something like POSIX as a
> guiding standard, rather than a central implementation which everyone
> must be bug-for-bug compatible with -- though there is some of that.
> (Right now, everyone has to be bug-for-bug compatible with Linux. Back
> in the day, it was Solaris, SunOS, perhaps even OSF/1...)

No. About 20-25 years ago I spent a lot of time porting programs between various
different versions of Unix. Yes: there were a few places that needed #ifdef
some feature or another, but that was a very small %age of the code.

-- 
Alain Williams
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