4.4BSD

[Michael Sokolov]

Thor Lancelot Simon <tls at rek.tjls.com> wrote:

> I frankly consider this to be silly, somewhat presumptious, and, for myself,
> at least, a waste of time.  But if it's something _you_ want to do, I
> encourage you to do it, I suppose.

You may believe whatever you want, but I will only remark that several very
prominent VAX hardware gurus (some of them on this list) support my work very
eagerly. Whatever you or the NetBSD gang may believe, my True UNIX is the only
UNIX system that is really a VAX OS and can truly drive a VAX the way it's
supposed to be driven.

> All that I ask is that you not touch the value of the "BSD" symbol which is
> exposed to the userland C namespace.  The chaos which would ensue should
> a "later" version of BSD appear which didn't support the full 4.4BSD feature
> set is horrifying to contemplate.

Don't worry, I'm not planning on doing that. Although I do not consider 4.4BSD
to be True UNIX, I do acknowledge that it exists, and I do respect the laws of
arithmetics and sequential numbering, so I don't plan on using numbers like
4.5BSD or 5BSD. Instead, I follow CSRG's own convention of calling 4.3-followup
systems 4.3BSD-BlahBlahBlah, just like they did with 4.3BSD-Tahoe.

> Despite the great temptation to do so, neither the NetBSD nor the FreeBSD
> project have taken up the mantle of CSRG [...]

Excellent! This gives me the luxury of being free from competitors.

> History is history.

Yes, history is history, and I respect it as such. I'm not trying to abuse my
write access to the 4BSD collection and maliciously modify some preserved tape
image without anyone's knowledge. However, there is nothing in the world that
prevents a developer from creating a new version of system from an old one. If
there is an SCCS file with deltas ranging from 1.1 to 7.16, there is absolutely
nothing in the world preventing a developer with legitimate authorized write
access to that file from checking in delta 7.17. I am a legitimate authorized
Berkeley UNIX developer (actually the principal one at the present time). My
title as the principal maintainer has been legitimized and blessed by the
previous CSRG maintainer.

> Pretending
> to be an organization which doesn't exist...

First of all, I didn't say "I'm CSRG", I said that I am CSRG's legitimate and
authorized successor. Second, there is nothing in the words "Computer Systems
Research Group" that is limited to Berkeley. Any group of researchers could
conceivably come up with that name. However, doing that would be extremely
confusing, therefore, I don't want to do that.

> [...] gets very little useful work done.

Check out the Quasijarus features page:

http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/Quasijarus/features.html

So far the list is not that long, but keep in mind that the work started less
than a month ago.

Michael Sokolov
TUHS 4BSD Coordinator
4.3BSD-* Maintainer
Quasijarus Project Principal Architect & Developer
Phone: 440-449-0299 or 216-217-2579
ARPA Internet SMTP mail: mxs46 at k2.scl.cwru.edu
TUHS WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/TUHS/
Quasijarus WWW page: http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/Quasijarus/

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