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From: mdw@cs.cornell.edu (Matt Welsh)
Subject: Re: I hope this won't ignite a major flame war, but I've got to know!
Message-ID: <1994Jul18.165720.13082@cs.cornell.edu>
Organization: Cornell CS Robotics and Vision Laboratory, Ithaca, NY 14850
References: <30drlt$7tc@news.u.washington.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 1994 16:57:20 GMT
Lines: 32
In article <30drlt$7tc@news.u.washington.edu> tzs@u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
>I realize I'm treading on dangerous ground here, since I'm going to
>mention {Free,Net)BSD and Linux in the same post, but something
>puzzles me. From what I've read (I've not had a chance to try any
>of these systems yet--I'm still shopping for hardware to try them
>out), {Free,Net}BSD are Berkeley-like (duh!) and Linux is closer to
>System V.
Linux is POSIX.1 compliant, and includes many System V extensions. These
extensions include many things htat are provided by BSD. The BSD-System V
line is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier.
If you want "true" BSDisms under Linux, the libbsd.a compatibility
library is provided. In reality, the differences between System V and
BSD (in modern implementations, at least) are not so large---at the
system call level, at least. Over time System V and BSD have duplicated
each other's features, so that few true dichotmies still exist.
As far as applications go, Linux favours System V-ish things, although
certain utilities are BSD-like in nature. Note that most of the utilities
running under Linux are GNU software, not vanilla BSD.
>Hence, I would expect {Free,Net}BSD to be overwhelmingly more popular
>than Linux.
I seriously doubt that most users base judgment on system call semantics
alone. Even if that were the case, there's no clear reason why either would
be more popular---software tends to port to Linux more easily (in my
experience) because of its broad compatibility with other systems, whereas
{Free,Net}BSD tends to adhere to "strict" BSD conventions.
M. Welsh