[TUHS] Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

[Clem Cole]

below.

On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> I'm curious if anyone has the scoop on this.  To my knowledge the 1984
> /usr/group standard constitutes the earliest attempt at a vendor-neutral
> UNIX
> standard.  AT&T then comes along in 1985 with the first issue of the SVID,
> based
> largely on SVR2 from what I know.
>
> There was a huge marketing campaign, "*System V. Consider it Standard*."
But the >>users<<, particularly those weaned on BSD, said "hardly."
/usr/group was an attempt to deal with Ultrix, HP-UX, AIX, and, much less,
Sys III/V.  SVID came later, and it was an attempt to force it down
people's throats.
The AT&T folks were sometimes a tad nasty at the POSIX meeting and wanted
IEEE to "just use it," and we say, "no.  It's incomplete and just plain
wrong is so many places."    The whole tar/cpio stuff from /usr/group was a
great example of the start of it, but even things like trying to define a
directory entry was strained.   SVID did not have the new UCB directory
system calls. For example, we all were certain that if we ever had a
different FS, we needed to remove physical formats from the specification.
 There were no sockets, and yet nearly 100% of the working networking code
in the wild, including on MS-DOS, was using sockets.

The problem was that several people who came to the POSIX meetings
post-SVID from AT&T were from marketing and sales. At the same time, the
core of the original /usr/group and later POSIX teams were mostly
engineering types.   The sales/mktg folks were trying to establish a brand,
the engineers were trying to solve an issue were we had code that did not
work between our different systems.
ᐧ
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