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[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license
is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
[[!meta title="POSIX compatibility"]]
Is it favorable of rather a hindrance to be compatible to POSIX and similar
standards?
A lot of things in POSIX et al. are designed for [[UNIX]]-like systems with
traditional monolithic [[kernel]]s.
Thus, a [[microkernel]]-based system, as ours is, has to employ a bunch of
detours, for example to implement the [[`fork` system call|glibc/fork]].
On the other hand, (mostly) complying to these standards, made a really big
body of software *just work* without any (or just trivial) [[hurd/porting]].
Especially so for command-line programs, and libraries.
But: a large part of today's user programs are not written according to POSIX
et al. low-level interfaces, but against GNOME, GTK+2, and other high-level
frameworks and libraries. It may be a valid option to enrich these instead of
striving for total POSIX compliance -- and the high-level programs (that is,
their users) may not even notice this, but we would avoid a lot of overhead
that comes with wrapping the [[Hurd interfaces|hurd/interface]] to be POSIX
compliant.
\#hurd IRC channel on Freenode, 2010-12-21:
<antrik> tschwinge: the writeup ignores the fact that POSIX compatibility
is not only for applications, but also for users familiar with the UNIX
environment
<antrik> also, I still don't buy the fact that most software is not written
for POSIX. even if assuming that GNOME programs don't use POSIX (which is
only half true), there is a lot of other software in a system that is
just as important, though less visible
<antrik> (server software, startup system, device management, automation,
...)
<antrik> tschwinge: BTW, I meant to (and partially did) write a blog
article on this topic -- but I didn't get around to finish it...
[[!tag open_issue_documentation]]
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