Re: [dsfjdssdfsd] Any plans for drafts or discussions on here?

["Dan Harkins" <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, January 22, 2014 4:25 pm, Francis Dupont wrote:
>  In your previous mail you wrote:
>
>>  > That seems like a strawman: who says that there is a "single source"
>> of
>>  > ideas for how to implement randomness? Three large server OSs (Linux,
>>  > FreeBSD, Windows) all do it differently.
>>
>>    The single source is "your OS". While there are 3 large server OSs,
>> there
>>  is no single application that can obtain randomness from all three
>> since
>>  there is no application that runs on all of them
>
> => I know many applications which run on these 3 OSs (and more, i.e.,
> Solaris, AIX and HP-UX too if you limit to still alive OSs).
> So either I didn't understand you or we are not talking about the same
> thing...

  If you take the executable from Solaris and copy it onto your HP-UX
machine it will not run.

  My point was that there were not 3 sources (Paul mentioned 3)
available to an application, there is just one: the one that's part of
OS that the application happened to be compiled for.

>>  (and my experience is
>>  that a single linux application won't necessarily work from version X
>> of
>>  the OS to version Y-- hell, sometimes the source won't even compile).
>
> => change your application developer?

  Ha, ha. Funny. I have considered firing myself several times.

  The issue was not the code I was writing, it is the annoying habit of
linux driver developers to change data structures (the one in question
was for an 802.11 device) in gratuitous ways that cause breakage. I
have never had that problem with freeBSD. In fact, the inability of an
application to just compile from one OS release to another is touted
as a feature by some of the more zealous linux people.

  Dan.