henry (06/10/82)
Have the folks at Berkeley forgotten that there are non-Berkeley Unixes in the world? (I confess I had suspected as much some time ago, but this is strong confirmation...) Hey, people: there is *no* community-wide standard on the contents of the gecos field, and it is grossly unreasonable to expect people to change their passwd file format to humor you. Now, I realize that there is a reasonable attitude along the lines of "our system is so much better than (say) V7 that we just won't bother being compatible any more". Whether this is reasonable when applied to x.yBSD or whatever is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But the essence of distributing software to be used by the entire network is that it *must* be compatible and you *cannot* take that attitude! If you are trying to write something that you want everybody to use, you absolutely must not incorporate local assumptions. If the software claims to be runnable under V7, it must not make assumptions beyond what is documented in the Unix Programmers Manual, 7th Edition. Now, I know this is a lot of work. I have some experience myself in trying to maintain V6 compatibility in V7 programs, and trying to maintain V7 compatibility under 4BSD must be worse. But that work is the price you pay for the right to claim that your software really is portable. There's just no way you can avoid it.