[ On Fri, April 10, 1998 at 10:14:43 (-0000), jiho@postal.c-zone.net wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Real vfork() (was: third results)
>
> On 09-Apr-98 Jason Thorpe wrote:
> 
> > For what it's worth, XPG4.2 defines the vfork(2) system call, and specifically
> > states that the address space is shared.  Thus, by having a shared address
> > space vfork(2), NetBSD has an XPG4.2-compliant vfork(2) system call.
> 
> Thank goodness SOMEONE has some sense.

The stuff of standards doesn't always make sense, nor does it have to
(and of course I'll claim this is one item that doesn't ;-).  Good
standards only describe current practice(s) so that those trying to
imitate it have a reference to go by.

As for NetBSD and standards we need look no further than:

	http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/standards.html

   NetBSD tries to conform to important industry standards like POSIX and
   Standard C. No efforts have been made to conform to X/Open Spec 1170, 
   since we believe that codifying the superset of all API's all the way
   back to Version 7 is not the right way to make a standard.
   
[....]

   NetBSD is extremely close to being POSIX.1 compliant. There are a few
   nits we know about: some we plan to fix, and others we plan to ignore
   until a future revision of POSIX.1 ``fixes'' them for us.

So, while this may be a bit out of date (it doesn't mention XPG4, though
that's mostly like SPec 1170 I think), I don't think the general
philosophy of NetBSD has changed (or should change).

I was actually trying to find the quote where NetBSD/core have said that
NetBSD is intended to be more of a research OS than a production OS too.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>