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Postings from October 1999
All this configure nightmare and standardization war stuff has led me to a new revelation - what the world really needs isn't a totally standard Posix, or Linux, or anything else - what the world needs is a standard way to unambiguously *describe* the uniqueness of all the different systems! (Maybe a job for XML?). It even sounds like something that a standards committee might be able to do, because there wouldn't be any reason to fight over which feature to standardize, the only job would be cataloging all the features there are and standardizing how to describe them in a machine readable fashion. The only argument might be the name to give the standard command everyone would need to support on their computers that folks could run to gain access to the database the exact same way on every system. (Microsoft would, of course, change the name of the command :-). And think of all the employment opportunities: Manufacturers would need consultants to help make sure their systems are described. You'd need test suites to verify the system really works the way its description file claims it does. The standards group could cash in by charging fees for certification that systems are described correctly. Heck, this could easily turn into an even more profitable boondoggle than ISO 9000 :-). (Particularly if you got the gummint into it with a mandate that all software systems developed for gummint computers must use this config database to maximize portability). But if it ever worked, it would be just billions and billions of times better than inadequate artificial intelligent scripts trying to deduce the answers. The answers would already be on the system, produced by the humans who built the thing and actually know what the answers are. Come to think of it, this was almost what Imake was supposed to be (but its main problem was brain sucking negative information content - the more you looked at it, the less you understood it :-).