[Debburn-devel] What is going on?

[Albert Cahalan]

On 9/20/06, Albert Chin <debburn-devel at mlists.thewrittenword.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 10:48:17AM -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote:

> > Please be more specific: the OS itself (perhaps with gcc, which
> > most people install anyway) or the OS with vendor compiler?
> > On every Solaris and Tru64 I've ever used, gcc was installed.
> > If you don't have that, you probably want binaries anyway.
>
> AIX 4.3.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
> HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, 11.23/PA, 11.23/IA
> IRIX 6.5
> Redhat Linux 7.1, 9
> RHEL 2.1/x86, 3/x86, 3/amd64, 4/x86, 4/amd64
> Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, 9, 10/SPARC, 10/x86
> Tru64 UNIX 5.1

Uh, why those specific versions? Do you personally have them?
Can you provide accounts, or are we all supposed to just write
code without being able to even see if it compiles?

Lots of those are very obsolete. A very obsolete OS doesn't
exactly need to run the latest cdrkit. It can keep running the
old cdrecord, from before any anti-GPL restrictions were added.

> All with the _vendor_ C compiler.

If you compile free software much, you will very quickly find
that you need gcc.

> > As for your OS choices: MacOS and OpenBSD are easier to support than
> > Tru64. (they have easily usable device names) They are also more
> > popular, and don't even have a non-gcc compiler in significant use.
> > Killing off the non-POSIX platforms is very nice though!
>
> I imagine any non free OS would be more difficult to support.

Generally so. That is but one factor. Lack of proper SCSI
device naming is another issue. Lack of POSIX features
like fork() is another.