RE: problems with XFree

["Harold Hunt" <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

> >[Smoke billows from Harold's keyboard as he quickly rewrites 20 years of
> >open-source and free-software to be compatible with Solaris, because
> >Dennis Foreman thought it would be a neat idea.]  Nice idea, but you
> >will have to work on that one yourself.
>
> It's not my idea. I have been to conferences where customers begged for
> compatibility. In fact, I was the founder of the IBM VM
> Compatibility Review
> Board in the 80's. I got a lot of code changed to make it compatible. I
> didn't make a lot of friends doing it. Compatibility with the past begins
> with one person, today, having the guts to say: I'm going to make MY code
> compatible. Then convincing others to do the same.
>

Yeah, and the point that you seem to keep missing is that we aren't the ones
to take this complaint to.  Take your complaints to the nine-to-fivers who
get paid to listen to this kind of stuff.

Personally, I think your complaint is way overblown.  My current day job is
to take a Fortran program originally written for VMS 20 years ago and port
it to Tru64 UNIX and Linux.  Turns out that the DEC FORTRAN compiler is
available for Tru64 UNIX as the Compaq Fortran Compiler and it is also
available for Linux as the Intel Fortran Compiler.  Hardly a thing has
changed in 20 years.  When I needed certain VMS system calls on *NIX, I took
the initiative to create a VMS-compatibility library for POSIX systems that
started off by implementing the system calls that I need:

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/vnix/


Three months ago I had never used Fortran, or even seen it, for that matter,
nor had I used VMS.  I learned everything that I  needed to port this
project in under three months, including starting VNIX as a side project.

In short, I don't see the compatibility problem.  I see challenges that you
are going to see in any profession on a daily basis, and you either step up
and solve the challenges or you retire.

With that being said, this thread is way off-topic and is now finished.

Dennis, you are very close to crossing the border from being a
Cygwin/XFree86 user to becoming a nuisance to the mailing list.  A nice
achievement in five days.  We ban nuisances, please don't become one.

Harold