4.4BSD

[Thor Lancelot Simon]

On Tue, Jan 26, 1999 at 03:40:19AM -0500, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> Thor Lancelot Simon <tls at rek.tjls.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

When it "drives" most VAXen, I encourage you to let me know.  It won't even
run on most of the VAXen I have, and I don't expect that to change any
time soon.  But if your definition of "the way it's supposed to be driven"
is "not at all", I guess I have no quibble with your logic, at least.  I
want support for the hardware I own, and features like mmap() and NFS.
Between those, I think you'll find quite a bit of the bloat you're complaining
about.  I also want some user-convenience features like dynamic libraries and
a compiler that can actually optimize code worth a damn, even if it's GCC,
which I think you'd probably find even more objectionable.  So any system
you produce is not likely to be useful to me.  Let's agree to disagree
about this.

> > 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.

You do understand that "CSRG's own convention" involved increasing the value
of the "BSD" symbol in the user namespace with each release?  I'm just asking
that you be careful not to produce a system which would be difficult to
distinguish from other systems with a very different feature matrix.

> 
> > 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.

Look, if you're going to mixmaster my text like this, I'm not about to
respond to yours any more and give you more material to play with.  As
I said, I have an interest in old Unices mostly for historical reasons;
you appear to have an interest because you want to branch new development
from them -- fine, that's as may be, who cares?  There's certainly room
for both points of view, and I fail to see why you're being so combative.

[...]
> 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.

I personally don't read the statement "If you want CSRG, here I am" quite
like that, but whatever.  You might not want to say things like that in
the future if you don't want to confuse and possibly irritate a fair
number of people who have a great deal of respect for CSRG and what they
did.  But that free advice is probably worth what you paid for it.

> 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.

It's nice to see someone working on any Berkeley UNIX.

Thor

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