Re: Using Hurd features (was: Re: Hurdish applications for persistence)

[ams]

Bas, and everyone else.  The whole point of the GNU system is to use
its own features, it isn't to run on every platform out there.  This
is simply not a goal of the GNU system, of which the Hurd is a crucial
part of.  So stop worrying about writting portable programs, and start
abusing the features that the Hurd provides, and then use autoconf
macros so that _IF_ another system supports a feature provided by the
GNU system, it will magiclly work.

I'll just quote the GNU Coding Standards:

,----
| In the Unix world, "portability" refers to porting to different Unix
| versions.  For a GNU program, this kind of portability is desirable, but
| not paramount.
| 
|    The primary purpose of GNU software is to run on top of the GNU
| kernel, compiled with the GNU C compiler, on various types of CPU.  So
| the kinds of portability that are absolutely necessary are quite
| limited.  But it is important to support Linux-based GNU systems, since
| they are the form of GNU that is popular.
`----

So if everyone writes proper configure.ac scripts, all is good, and if
a system implements something that we have, the program will start
using it automagiclly.

The problem with Linux specific hacks is that they don't check for
_features_, they just assume that something exists.  Which is why
Linux-specific hacks suck, that and Linux is known to not care about
API compabilitiy, we do.