Re: About satandrads and politics

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, JF Martinez wrote:

> About standards: the Posix standard tells a Unix system should include
> VI but notice that there were no Linux representaives in this committee
> (in fact Linux diddn't even exist) and still less representatives of
> the kind of people we are targettting and who are begining to come to
> Linux.  To say bluntly this standard is alien to us.

I disagree. One of the main goals/features of linux is POSIX compliance. I
don't think we should call it linux if we are to break POSIX compliance in
a big way, because to do so would be a gross misuse of the name "linux".
To call a system with broken POSIX support by the name of linux is as bad
as Microsoft calling "J++" java.

Another point is that the fact that linux people didn't write the standard
is not a reason to ignore it. The linux people didn't invent TCP, HTTP,
FTP, or CORBA either.

> I will give an analogy based on real world.  Silversmiths are major

[ snip ]

bad analogy. The point of POSIX is that it is an interoperabity standard.

> So the point is: "Do we dare to challenge tradition and
> traditionalists frontally or do we take a lower profile approach?"  By

If we can challenge tradition without challenging standards and
interoperability, it's a good thing.

> lower profile I mean providing for programs never calling it (the user
> must call it explicitly) and providing for the user ever having an
> alternative even when using rescue floppies.  And of course
> mentionning it in the announce.

The lower profile approach is smarter.

BTW, since you think this text editor thing is such a big issue, I have a
suggestion:

We have a big "text editor" icon on the default K desktop which opens up
kedit. I also like the other suggestion about aliasing the "edit" command
to pico or something like that.

Cheers,
-- 
Donovan