[NTLUG:Discuss] ..free choice -- and XP/ Passport- HERE HERE!

[Steve Baker]

greenglow484 at juno.com wrote:

> > If the MAC OSX is unix based...does that mean that an application
> > written
> > for OSX would be or could be linux compatible?
> 
> Someone else who is more knowledgeable than I will have to respond to
> that one;  Dunno.  I would think it would open up a lot more
> compatibility.

Well, it *would* - but for some very strange decisions Apple made about
where things are placed in the directory heirarchy.

Software like my of pair of games (see below) ported very easily to OS-X
with scarcely a line of code to change (it was considerably MORE work to
go from SuSE 7.1 to RedHat 7.x with their bogus C++ compiler).

Software that's *written* to be portable is fairly easy to move to any
platform though.  That same code for my games runs under Windoze and the
older MacOS's.

However, the build mechanisms - autoconf, automake, libtool and all that
stuff don't work at all well under OS-X because of the rearranged file
system and don't work at all under Windoze unless you get the cygwin
environment - which makes Windoze look a lot more like Linux/UNIX at the
shell level.

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