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

[Charles H Sauer (he/him)]

further below

On 5/16/2025 12:57 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> below.
> 
> On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org 
> <mailto: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.

"Convergence of AIX and 4.3BSD" 
(https://technologists.com/sauer/Convergence_of_AIX_and_4.3BSD.pdf) was 
another alternative to SVID that was intended to address a spectrum of 
requirements. It was gratifying that AIX people, IBM BSD people and 
Bruce Walker of LCC were able to reach consensus and put our names on 
that paper.

Charlie

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