From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson)
Subject: Re: IMPORTANT: POSIX threatens our use of lp/lpr and friends
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC
Distribution: na
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 01:57:50 GMT

In article <DUKE.93Jan25133151@portal.paperboy.osf.org> duke@portal.paperboy.osf.org (Duke Robillard) writes:

>You know, I've been resisting the urge to defend myself against Atkinson's
>uninformed, hysterical attacks, but I've just lost my self-control.  I
>know I'll hate myself later for getting into a flame war....

Nah.  Get it off your chest.  You'll feel much better afterwards and
it won't bother me at all.  Really. :-)

  However, I do think "uninformed" is wholly inaccurate since I TRIED
to participate in the mock ballot and so I saw that draft (and was very
unhappy about the draft ignoring both the existing practice of lp/lpr
-- recall that MIT _removed_ Palladium from most of its systems
because MIT felt it was less useful than just using existing practice
such as lp/lpr and friends -- and the POSIX.2 precedent of
standardising a simple lp interface).  I sent written comments in
via the USPS as part of the mock ballot process.

>Randall Atkinson hasn't been involved with the 1003.7.1 group at all,
>at least not in the last 2.5 years.  If he had spent any time working
>with us, he would know that the people on the group are engineers trying
>to solve a problem, not marketing types trying to make money off other 
>people's misfortune.  

  I _TRIED_ very hard to participate in the mock ballot and I _HAVE_
sent written comments in via the USPS and I _HAVE_ looked at the draft
circulated with the mock ballot.  

  I might be very very mistaken (clearly I don't think so but I've
surely been wrong in public before now), but if I am wrong it is
legitimate confusion or stupidity or ignorance rather than ill will
towards any individual.
 
>If he has legitmate technical concerns with Palladium, I'd appreciate
>it if he brought them forward, rather than posting nasty cracks about
>people's motives.

See the above paragraphs.

  AT A MINIMUM, my postings have caused a whole lot more users and
systems administrators to become interested in the POSIX.7 work, to
want to read copies of the POSIX.7 draft, and might well help motivate
some of those folks to get involved in the POSIX.7 balloting group.
More review and participation by users and systems administrators
cannot possibly be a bad thing for the effort.  

  If they participate and like the Palladium approach, they will
surely vote for it.  If they participate and don't like it, they will
tell the IEEE why they don't like it and how to fix it and that can't
be a bad outcome either.  It is a kind of win/win scenario for more
users and systems administrators to be involved in all POSIX
standards.

  Now while I'm sure that Duke personally thinks that POSIX.7 are
doing The Right Thing, I'm at least as sure that it isn't The Right
Thing.  On that we're not likely to be agreeing soon.

  By the way, I do agree with most or all of Doug Gwyn's comments
about how a general batching/queueing solution (e.g. BRL's MQDS) would
be a technically surperior approach and would be compatible with
retaining the current user command line interfaces for printing.

Ran
atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil

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