*BSD News Article 10166


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From: cflatter@nrao.edu (Chris Flatters)
Subject: Re: IMPORTANT: POSIX threatens our use of lp/l
Message-ID: <1993Jan20.165932.27305@zia.aoc.nrao.edu>
Sender: news@zia.aoc.nrao.edu
Reply-To: cflatter@nrao.edu
Organization: NRAO
References: <C15sst.JqA@ra.nrl.navy.mil>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 93 16:59:32 GMT
Lines: 34

In article JqA@ra.nrl.navy.mil, Ran Atkinson <atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil> () writes:
>  Now another subgroup of POSIX, namely POSIX.7 which works on system
>administration stuff, has proposed standardising printing commands and
>interfaces based on the PALLADIUM software developed by certain firms
>of the Closed Software Foundation.  They propose to do this despite
>the widespread use of lp/lpr/lprm/lpq/lpstat/lpadmin within the UNIX
>world.  If they succeed, you may expect that your existing printing
>commands WILL eventually go away and be replaced by this Palladium
>stuff.  We users and administrators will lose big time if this
>marketing ploy within POSIX succeeds.

The only points I have ever seen raised against the Palladium printer
commands and interfaces are as follows.

- They are not lpr, lprm etc.
		So what?

- There is some sort of connection with the OSF or its members.
		I'm no fan of the OSF but (again): so what?

- MIT don't use Palladium and disown it.
		This statement doesn't mean a whole lot unless we know why.
		If MIT don't use Athena's Palladium because the implementation
		sucked then this is irrelevant to POSIX.7.  If MIT don't use
		Athena's Palladium because there are problems with the 
		Palladium interfaces which have not been corrected in the
		draft version of POSIX.7 then these problems should be
		documented and made known to the POSIX.7 committee.

In short, I am not going to vote against anything just because someone tells
me it is bad: I want to see some convincing reasons why it is bad.

	Chris Flatters
	cflatter@nrao.edu