Looking back, the social dynamics of the Unix group helped a lot in keeping the bloat small. The rule was, whoever touches something last becomes its owner. Of course, we were all free to complain about things, and did, but the amalgamation of tinkerings that characterizes most of the Linux commands just didn't happen. At times this hot-potato activity worked very well. In a moment of inspiration I thought up the syntax for the 'at' command ( "at 3am cc -o *.c", etc. ). I implemented it as a shell script and it was pretty feeble. My implementation lasted about a week -- I came in on a Monday and Dennis had plugged the majority of the holes -- got the permissions right, saved the search path and current directory, etc. I think we were both happy with the process...

I think the other thing we understood was that if you added an on/off option to your application you had a choice of either doing twice as much testing as previously, or testing both configurations of the code half as much. If you look at the gcc manual, you can see the result -- many dozen pages just listing the options. It's probably up around the age of the universe now to reliably test the whole thing. And it seems like if you set the options differently than usual, thing break, can't be debugged reliably, or something else surprising. One rule with Linux: do it vanilla or go home...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>

To:
"Marc Rochkind" <rochkind@basepath.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Tue, 7 Feb 2017 18:10:52 -0500
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] How Unix brings people together, or it's a small

And I think it has been peed on by many different people trying to leave their own mark on it along the way.

On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 11:06 PM, Marc Rochkind <rochkind@basepath.com> wrote:
Of course. Linux is:

1. old,
2. designed by a huge group,
3. intended to serve many purposes

UNIX was, at least in its early days, the opposite in all three ways. But, after 15 years or so, it also was numbers 1 - 3. (Speaking of System V here.)

There have been OSes that remained beautifully sleek and uncluttered forever. Such as BeOS. However, all such systems failed to achieve critical mass. Which is why they remained true.

No way out of this trap.

--Marc

On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 8:03 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> Lots of commands are now little shells
...
> Linux today is much more like the systems
> Unix displaced than it is like Unix

So depressingly true!

Doug