undefined | Better HN

0 pointszeckalpha7mo ago0 comments

Some Linux distros have gotten certified. I assume they have released necessary patches as required by GPL.

0 comments

pxc7mo ago

I don't think any patches are required. It's literally just a matter of going through the certification dance for the average distro.

mdasen7mo ago

There are patches required. Many GNU utilities are very close to the UNIX spec, but not quite the UNIX spec - including glibc. But making a Linux distro that is UNIX certified would likely make it a worse Linux distro for most people since it would be less compatible with what everyone is assuming for a Linux distro. A lot of the differences are subtle edge cases, but do you really want that in your distro?

It's not just about going through a song-and-dance. It's about making an OS that has different behavior - often very tiny differences, but differences that would make the distro worse for most users.

gsnedders7mo ago

How close are the GNU coreutils with the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable set?

I wouldn't be surprised if there were still patches required, but at least on the face of it that should get you most of the way there.

skissane7mo ago

> It's not just about going through a song-and-dance. It's about making an OS that has different behavior - often very tiny differences, but differences that would make the distro worse for most users.

Is this actually true? Can you give a real example of where Huawei EulerOS or Inspur K-UX are inferior to their non-certified base (yet another Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone) due to their UNIX certification?

swiftcoder7mo ago

Don't you have to ship the BSD-compatible versions of grep et al?

pxc7mo ago

I'm not sure why you would. I don't think POSIX generally specifies the behavior of command line tools in such a level of detail. FWIW, the regex type used by default by GNU Grep is already POSIX's Basic Regular Expressions. (It also supports POSIX Extended Regular Expressions and PCRE2.)

Afaik, EulerOS and other Unix-certified Linux distros just ship the usual GNU userland.

mdasen7mo ago

The Single UNIX Specification does specify the behavior of many command line tools like ed, grep, awk, etc. OpenBSD sometimes notes where their tools vary from the UNIX spec. It's usually very small ways that don't matter to most people, but it does put them outside of the UNIX spec.

swiftcoder7mo ago

POSIX != Unix. Unix certification does require POSIX, but it also comes with a bunch more stringent requirements

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

pxc7mo ago

I don't think any patches are required. It's literally just a matter of going through the certification dance for the average distro.

mdasen7mo ago

It's not just about going through a song-and-dance. It's about making an OS that has different behavior - often very tiny differences, but differences that would make the distro worse for most users.

gsnedders7mo ago

How close are the GNU coreutils with the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable set?

I wouldn't be surprised if there were still patches required, but at least on the face of it that should get you most of the way there.

skissane7mo ago

swiftcoder7mo ago

Don't you have to ship the BSD-compatible versions of grep et al?

pxc7mo ago

Afaik, EulerOS and other Unix-certified Linux distros just ship the usual GNU userland.

mdasen7mo ago

swiftcoder7mo ago

POSIX != Unix. Unix certification does require POSIX, but it also comes with a bunch more stringent requirements

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse