make versionitis? (OpenBSD) QUESTION TO MAINTAINERS IMBEDD ED

[Marc Espie]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 08:58:29AM -0800, Donn Terry wrote:
> Having been involved in the standards process for quite some time,
> the key phrase in the interpretation was "the standard does not
> speak to the issue".  That's the code phrase for "we blew it,
> it doesn't say, does it?".  (I've written a few of those myself.)
> The IEEE rules are quite explicit; when the standard doesn't speak 
> to the issue "no conformance distinction can be made".  That says
> that implementations can do it either way (or as many ways as they
> can invent).  It says that applications can't count on anything.  

Well, I don't even agree.
In open standards, you often just standardize common practice, and stuff
you can't agree upon, because distinct prior art exist, is left as 
implementation-dependent.

When I'm saying that things are crystal-clear, I mean this: the standard
does not mention it, there is evidence out there that some conforming stuff
has differing behavior: the standard doesn't mandate anything.

Note that lots of standards leave a lot of details open. This does not mean
that those standards are bad. It just means that, for portability, you can't
depend on the details. This is good. Makefiles are already fairly powerful
within the standard, and there are other features MISSING from the standard
that would be more useful than embedded variables.