| William H. Magill on Tue, 28 Jan 2003 19:25:16 -0500 |
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On Tuesday, January 28, 2003, at 03:54 PM, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote: On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 09:07:21AM -0500, Christian Hedemark wrote:Calling AIX a UNIX is a stretch, too. :-) For years it's been a standing joke -- the only reason that AIX isn't the worst version of Unix available is because HP-UX is. Ultrix was the last "pure BSD" version that wasn't called BSD. Solaris is more System V than BSD with no OSF added. The old Sun OS was similar to BSD until Bill got cosy with IBM and the resulting Solaris looked mostly System V-ish. Digital Unix, aka Tru64 Unix was the only version of Unix to ever actually implement the OSF code. Other vendors added features to make their proprietary versions "OSF Compliant" OSF/1 itself was a collection of technologies implemented from different vendors and OS styles. And then BSD itself isn't very BSD like any more. And Darwin is? As for "direct member," it depends upon which branch and how much incest you want to allow for - USG vs OSF and all that good stuff. Now AIX is more System V than BSD with a measure of OSF thrown in. All of these changes have occurred both because of evolution as well as license and copyright issues. As ATT used to say ... Unix(tm) is a 5 letter word. Linux is most definitely NOT a Unix(tm)... because Unix(tm) is a brand name and there is an entire suite of tests which must be passed before one gets to pay the fee that allows one to call your thing -- Unix(tm). And you'll never catch Linus trying to pretend it is a Unix or calling it one. Some go so far as to claim -- if it doesn't respond to "man hier" it's not "really" Unix. (hier is the description of the "Standard file system hierarchy"). Over the years the "generally accepted" file system usage conventions have become VERY OS dependent. There really hasn't been any kind of seriously consistant usage for many years. /var never existed until Sun started using it. But people thought it was a good idea and have continued to do so. Long ago, /usr/users/<userid> was once where everybody's home directory was placed. But disks were too small and people kept too much crap around... /home/<userid> became popular. And then people discovered that even /home didn't scale for squat on a system with 10 or 15 thousand timesharing users, so we moved to /home/<letter>/<userid>. /local is a new invention. Before that it was /usr/local and before that it didn't exist -- you just installed your software right alongside the vendor's in the same directories. I doubt that the /usr/local install convention was common before about 1995. (I forget when use of Larry Wall's "configure" became widespread and effectively enforced the new standard.) And then of course is /usr/opt... :) [Dammed if I know, some vendors use it some don't.] In short, it's whatever floats your boat. Next we can go argue Unixness on Computer Science grounds -- is a micro-kernel or a monolithic-kernel "Unix." By the way, I counted 723 on the head of my pin... T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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