[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

Steve Nickolas usotsuki at buric.co
Fri Sep 15 05:52:18 AEST 2017


On Thu, 14 Sep 2017, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>> Maybe some are deluded like that.  But the more typical case (and I saw
>>> this personally not just on "the Internet") are those who actively and
>>> consciously disdain Unix, and want Penguin kernel based systems to move
>>> to a completely new and different userland, free from any links to Unix
>>> history.
>>>
>>> And we should stop assuming they're kidding when they say so openly.
>>>
>>
>> Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
>
> It's mostly Lennart Poettering and his fan club, but it's also
> important to remember that Unix was not perfect.
>
> For years, I've been ranting about the telldir/seekdir interface, for
> which JFS has three b-trees that have to be updated for every
> directory operation --- one of which was added *just* because of
> telldir/seekdir.  Other file systems make other design choices or go
> through other bits of hell just because of telldir/seekdir, but
> assuming a 32-bit cookie which must survive potentially indefinitely,
> with the readdir "will return file names exactly zero or one times"
> guarantees required by POSIX, is rather hellish.
>
> Or, say the atime update requirement, which can be a performance
> killer, and for which the default on Linux violates Posix, and so I
> suppose it technically isn't allowed to use the Unix trademark anyway.
>
> I'm sure the Plan 9 folks could come up with other Unix shortcomings.  :-)
>
> 	   	       	     	     	    - Ted
>

I never managed to pull it off, but I tried creating a full live Linux 
environment based on musl, clang, Heirloom Toolchest and OpenBSD/NetBSD 
sources.  The idea was that I wanted to make a "Real Unix" that happened 
to have Linux as its kernel.  (It also would have run the CDE as its 
default desktop.)

One thing I did come up with was, if I were to pull it off, it would be a 
Linux distribution that rightfully could NOT be called, by any means, 
"GNU/Linux" - and some heads would explode.

(I still want to do it, but I remain at a loss as to execution.)

-uso.



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