[Openicc] [Icc_users] ICC and Linux

[Graeme Gill]

Klaus Karcher wrote:

> Graeme Gill wrote:
>> I added '*nix' to Argyll's icclib to cover Linux/Unix's of various
>> flavors. This is unofficial. If there was a consensus, then perhaps
>> the ICC may be prepared to officially adopt a signature for
>> such platforms.
> 
> I would appreciate it.

The problem is that the existing platform signatures are rather
specific: 'APPL', 'MSFT', 'SUNW', 'SGI ' 'TGNT'

Taligent is defunct, but SUNW and SGI are/were both Unix based
platforms, while APPL is covering both old OS9 based
platforms and new NeXT/Mach/Unix based OS X.
MSFT is covering both Windows 3 and Windows NT operating
system (quite different underlying architectures).

So the purpose and specificity of the platform signature is
quit unclear to an outsider.

One could imagine suggesting specific platform/Operating
systems such as Linux, BSD, Hurd, BeOS etc. to bring this
up to date.

For my own purposes I thought it useful to provide some
indication of the primary platform not being either
Mac or MSWindows without trying to resolve such questions,
hence '*nix'.

In practice as far as I'm concerned it's of academic
interest only, since none of my code will pay any
attention to what this tag is set to.

(I'd suggest that it would be sensible if MATLAB
ignored it too.)

So the question is, is it reasonable to suggest
to the ICC that '*nix' be added to cover Unix like
operating system platforms such as Linux, BSD etc ?

[I'm Cc'in this to the openicc list since people there
  may have some view. I'll summarize responses to the
  icc_users list if needed.]

Graeme Gill.