Linux and the 'clssic' computing world

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 2021-09-28 02:26, Tor Arntsen via cctalk wrote (in part):
> On Mon, 27 Sept 2021 at 23:31, Zane Healy via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> On Sep 27, 2021, at 2:15 PM, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>> On 2021-09-27 10:07, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote (in part):
>>>> However, much of the "Linux" software is in fact POSIX software, and can quite easily be ported between Linux and other *NIX-likes, such as Solaris, macOS and the *BSD family.
>>> I cannot agree.  Many developers ensure that their software runs under their particular distribution and then call it POSIX. Porting to UNIX systems, such as Solaris or macOS, can be difficult and tedious.  (Of course, this is not a Linux issue.)
>>>
>>> N.
>> This also sums up nicely what is Linux’s greatest failing.  Software vendors need “Linux”, and what they get is “Red Hat”, “SLES”, “Ubuntu”, etc. and as a result, the users suffer.  This is why most commercial apps target MacOS and Windows, or more often than not, just Windows.
> Everything I personally develop for Linux will build on all Linux
> distros, and also IRIX, Solaris, AIX, and, until recently, Tru64
> (because I have access to those systems, except for Tru64 now). And to
> some extent BSD variants.  It's not hard at all.

Writing portable s/w may not be difficult but it takes some discipline 
on the part of the programmers.  Many programmers only have Linux 
distros so they (perhaps understandably) only develop in their environment.

>   And the company I
> work for used to have build systems for all of the above until not
> that far ago, but, as customers more and more move to Linux systems
> the build support and tests have been removed for most of the rest
> (AIX still hangs on by a thread). As for the various Linux distros,
> the issue isn't really that they are that different, it's that they
> don't have the same version of core software - in particular moving
> targets like the C++ compiler (and this goes for various releases of
> the same distro too).

I have the same experience.  We produced s/w that ran on dozens of 
different UNIX and non-UNIX systems including embedded systems.  The 
main point was to write POSIX C-code (and stay away from the 
preprocessor).  Our main issue was that native compilers were not always 
as compliant as claimed.  We were fortunate in that our s/w was either 
back-end or embedded without the need -- read headache -- of GUI 
interfaces.

N.