This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 00:15:07 -0700 From: Romain Kang <romain@kzsu.stanford.edu> To: svlug@lists.svlug.org Subject: [svlug] Re: OS X is not Unix Here is my perspective as a UNIX user of 20 years, and an iBook user of 14 months. The one USENIX conference I attended was Phoenix 1987 when Steve Jobs presented the keynote address. Jobs said that to make UNIX usable to the masses, someone would need to remove the system administrator from the system. Afterward, I overheard one of the conferees say how frightening it was for him to imagine his mother attempting to run fsck. Jobs also said, "X is braindamaged and will fail" (verbatim), to the applause of some other conferees. OS X, then, should be no surprise to anyone who heard him in 1987. I give Apple great credit for achieving what Jobs envisioned back then, but the audience he wanted is different from the traditional UNIX hacker crowd. I'm mostly a text-based computer programmer and user, and all the pretty ornamentation of OS X and its lack of a fast, simple select-and-copy of word and line objects like a suitably configured xterm or rxvt is a major impediment to me. (Yes, you can run X on X, but the integration between the X11 and OS X desktops is decidedly clunky). Likewise, so is the absence of a developer environment on the default install. One of the first things I did with the iBook was to download the developer tools, only to find they didn't match the OS X that had shipped. Out went my dream of installing the tools I've carried with me for years. I tried using GNU-Darwin packages, but I found the BSD-style packaging weak in comparison to RPMs, and I still didn't have the environment to build open source tools. I repartitioned the hard drive and installed Yellow Dog Linux, which has been my primary iBook environment ever since. I imagine Jaguar might work out better since they include the developer environment on one of the CD's, but I have no desire to spend my time on this when Linux already suits 99% of my needs and I rarely need to boot OS X. But I don't share Paul Reed's definition of UNIX. In his article, I hear echoes of csh/4.1 BSD/VAX students confronted with sh/7th Edition/PDP-11 at their first jobs. Underneath, OS X has the UNIX API's, which to me are the essence of UNIX. You can have an embedded system run a UNIX kernel (or one of its workalikes) and a program targeted to the UNIX OS API will run. Though it may not have the command line APIs and would not be a suitable desktop environment for me, I am still inclined to call it UNIX. And if this highly specialized variant qualifies as a member of the UNIX family, I can't see any reason to exclude OS X. ===