1. The problem is a different one: You develop for a 1-2 core machine and afterwards this stuff is destined to work on real servers. I can´t count how often i found massive scaling problems in systems you wasn´t able to find on a notebook, but was pretty obvious on larger system. Sometimes i was able to remove the problem, but often we replicated the development plattform by using 1-2 socket servers.
2. Obviously GNU make has advantages. I don´t have anything against GNU make. I just hate this Linux centric view. But from my perspective it would be more feasible to extend the standards (for example SUSv5 ;) ) to keep programs more portable between all Unixes and derivates. Free Software should be operating system agnostic.
3. I have to correct you: HPUX and OSF/1 is mainly on life life-support because of HP ill-fated decisions with PA-RISC and Alpha in favour of Itanic. AIX isn´t a toy for testing ... in the real world there are many systems running those operating sytems like Solaris and AIX. You just have too look at the market data: Sun and IBM still sell systems worth billions of $.
4. Yes gmake is in Solaris ... because of the dependence of many build procceses. But i´m still thinking it would be better to define unixwide standards that include GNU make. At the moment the behaviour is similar to Microsoft. We have our LSB .. that´s a standard ... the bad thing ... it´s a extended version of POSIX, SUS and so on. I think people should ask, why there is the need for a extended own standard instead of extending the existing standards.
At the risk of being a bit gnomic: the standard is here to serve me, I am not here to serve the standard. Apparently the Linux community has more of a taste for writing code than worrying about bureaucratic processes. I can't say that I blame them.
When everybody thinks like that, only bureaucrats define standards. Lack of standards let to many problem: I´m just thinking about the amount of power supplies i have to carry. A power supply for the company mobile, a power supply for the iPhone (or at least the USB cable), a power supply for the notebook. I have three small switches from three vendors needing three separate voltages (a standard would be nice here, for example for a central power supply feeding all this stuff). My USB hard drives have their own power supply. The 1.5 TB Maxtor from the special offer have a different one than the 2 1TB Fujitsu-Siemens drives. Standards are bureaucratic, but they help ... but we have to work on them, to enable them to serve us. And at the end it´s the same at power supplies as with Unix standards.
2. Obviously GNU make has advantages. I don´t have anything against GNU make. I just hate this Linux centric view. But from my perspective it would be more feasible to extend the standards (for example SUSv5 ;) ) to keep programs more portable between all Unixes and derivates. Free Software should be operating system agnostic.
3. I have to correct you: HPUX and OSF/1 is mainly on life life-support because of HP ill-fated decisions with PA-RISC and Alpha in favour of Itanic. AIX isn´t a toy for testing ... in the real world there are many systems running those operating sytems like Solaris and AIX. You just have too look at the market data: Sun and IBM still sell systems worth billions of $.
4. Yes gmake is in Solaris ... because of the dependence of many build procceses. But i´m still thinking it would be better to define unixwide standards that include GNU make. At the moment the behaviour is similar to Microsoft. We have our LSB .. that´s a standard ... the bad thing ... it´s a extended version of POSIX, SUS and so on. I think people should ask, why there is the need for a extended own standard instead of extending the existing standards.