Re: MiNT goes UNIX. I hope not.

[Stephen Usher <Stephen.Usher@earth.ox.ac.uk>]

>> > >  What you are suggesting is to deprive Atari from everything it
>> > > is special at, and when you've done that, people will tell you they'd
>> > > rather buy a HP 9000/400 to run your stuff!
>> > 
>> >  Then please tell me what the whole point of MiNT really is?!
> 
> Well HOPEFULLY it is not purely an attempt to get a LINUX-smell-alike
> without having to buy a 486?

The original purpose of MiNT was to create an operating system for the Atari
ST series which was as much like Unix as possible yet be TOS compatible.
This was stated by Eric Smith way back.. I remember it being said way back
at version 0.6 at least. This may well have changed by now as Atari jointly
own MiNT.

It's not going to become a "Linux-smell-alike" as Linux is a totally new OS
which is Unix-like and not compatable with MSDOS other than with an emulator.

Anyway, what IS so wrong about getting closer to the world's de-facto open
standard? Surely you should be praising people for trying to bring TOS into
the main stream of real-world computing.

>> >  Reasons may vary, but obviously there're people being interested in it,
>> > so why not try to make the best out of it?
> 
> All I'm trying to say here is that MiNT should be something for the Atari,
> and something which can be recognized as such.  So your interpretation of
> 'making the best out of MiNT' is to make Atari computers behave as similar
> to UNIX boxes as possible?  That's like going from Amsterdam to Paris
> by the Orient Express if you ask me.  Try Atari System V :-)

Atari SYSVr4 is big and expensive, oh and it's SYSVr4.. surely a big iron
nail in its coffin. :-)

Oh.. I forgot.. Atari canned it in its Beta-test stange, so you can't buy it
anyway.

>-- 
>Annius V. Groenink | E-mail: avg@cwi.nl      |  Private & ZFC:
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Bringing the filesystem roadmap into a standard can only help people who
want to run free software from the net as people will only need to download
binary distributions with standard install scripts.

There will be no more "I downloaded package X but I can't get it working on
my system" or "which environment variable does this package use to find the
temporary directory" questions as the paths can be hard-coded. The OS does
all the fiddly bits of working out which drive /tmp or /var/spool/mail etc
are on. This is as it should be. Let the OS, not the user, take the strain,
that's what it's there for.

Steve
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