[rescue] OS X is certified UNIX

[John Francini]

ULTRIX was very much descended from BSD, inheriting both its kernel 
and userland 'personality' from that OS.  And, in turn, DEC 
OSF/1->Digital Unix-->Tru64 UNIX had a very BSD-ish userland 
(descended from Ultrix for compatibility) with a Mach-derived kernel. 
Many things from the System V side were brought over as well into 
Tru64.

j


At 11:05 +0300 6/14/07, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 08:23:36AM +0100, Mark wrote:
>>  When NEXTSTEP first morphed into OS X it was still heavily reliant on 
>>  NetInfo. As such so were early OS X versions. Of late less and less 
>>  is depending on netinfo and I get the impression they are trying to 
>>  ditch it in favour of proven UNIX methods. It's not UNIX as I 
>>  understand it from using Solaris and AIX, for gods sakes it doesn't 
>>  even have 'pg'! It is currently much closer to UNIX than it was 
>>  though, which can't be a bad thing...
>
>IMHO you are confusing UNIX as in what came from AT&T and when. BSD 
>was built on
>what was then UNIX V7 (and before that older versions of UNIX). AT&T came out
>with the totally different System V (aka system 5). Many of the 
>FEATURES of BSD were
>included in the System V Kernel, but most of the commands were different.
>
>In the non BSD world, they merged around 1990 with System V release 
>3.2 which included
>many of the BSD commands in /usr/ucb/bin, which could be added to 
>your path as an option.
>It also included TCP compatability with BSD STREAMS. System V 
>release 4 was the real
>combination, just about everything included in BSD was included in UNIX.
>
>In the open source community, nothing sits still, so that many of 
>the programs that
>were included in System V, found their way back to BSD as user provided code.
>Back before Linux became popular, things were never distributed as 
>runable modules
>(object code), they were provided as source code with a set of 
>defines in a header
>file that needed to be manipulated to get it to work on your system.
>
>This later led to makfefiles with targets for different systems and 
>C ifdefs in the
>code for various targets.
>
>Next's BSD was based on a modified BSD Kernel with the Mach (is it 
>an acronym or
>named after the scientist?) Kernel on top of it. It also included 
>BSD commands.
>
>MacOS X was something different. It was a (successfull) attempt to take
>the base BSD/Nextstep system and port the Macintosh GUI to it. However
>the shell and command libraries were considered an option that most
>people would not want. I think even in Tiger, the "BSD subsystem"
>(terminal, shells and commands) are an option.
>
>There also is a large library of "Darwin Ports" both from an 
>organized group and a
>individuals of other open source programs, most of them originaly 
>developed for Linux.
>
>There still is no real crossover from the Mac GUI to the UNIX GUI (X 
>windows), however
>the Tiger implementation allows you to use Aqua (the Mac GUI) as an 
>X window mananger.
>A prime example of this is Open Office, which is an X Windows 
>application and can not
>use many of the services of Aqua. A side project, called Neo Office, 
>combines the two
>by replacing the Open Office user interface with a Java one.
>
>BTW, don't feel that you are the only one who feels that things are 
>missing or different,
>until System V release 4 came out, there were many people who 
>thought that BSD was the
>"real" UNIX and System V was not. There was a combination of them 
>out there and a lot
>of rivalry. NCR's UNIX, AIX, A/UX, IRIX and the slew of X86 UNIXes 
>from independent
>vendors were all System V based, SunOS (and Solaris 1) were BSD 
>based. I don't know
>what ULTRIX (DEC's VAX UNIX offering) was, but most universities ran 
>BSD on their VAX,
>as AT&T gave (I think for free) the necessary licenses to them in the V7 era.
>
>Geoff.
>
>
>--
>Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
>IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
>Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/
>_______________________________________________
>rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

-- 
John Francini, francini at mac.com

"The journey is more important than the destination -- that's part of life.
If you only live for getting to the end, you're almost always disappointed."
                               -- Donald Knuth