Re: On Compatibility

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 20:11 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

> Porting autoconf has nothing to do with porting GTK.  You don't need
> autoconf to configure, build, port and run GTK.

It is hypothetically possible to get all of the configured files right
by hand, but in practice we didn't have enough years in our expected
lives to do it. Perhaps you can show us how to do it. Assistance would
certainly be welcome.

>    Separately, we will want to do a full POSIX compatibility box for
>    execution of legacy applications.
> 
> It isn't acceptable to classify GNU programs as legacy applications on
> the primary system that they are supposed to run on and are designed
> for.

Sure it is. Consider bash. Bash is an imitation of ksh, which was
released within Bell Labs around 1986. ksh was in turn compatible with
sh, which goes back to the beginning of unix. If that isn't a legacy
application, I don't know what is. Heck, Dave's oldest kid wasn't out of
diapers when Dave released ksh. Or m4. Hell, even Stu Feldman thought m4
was crap, and he wrote it!

The only users of bash are developers. Developers are very important,
but they are not the *most* important users.

The fact that a program is "legacy" does not mean that it is a bad
program. Similarly, the fact that a program is "GNU" does not mean that
it is particularly good or useful. Some are, many aren't.


shap