[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 31, Issue 9

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 11:56:54AM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> Hmm.  You know about the UFS2 work that Kirk did in FreeBSD over the
> last few years, right?  Here's part of the last commit he did.

You're right but I already sent out mail correcting that statement.

But the point I was really trying to make had little to do with UFS,
I was simply trying to establish my credentials as a kernel hack (once
upon a time).  Because without being one, making comments on all the
various Unices out there is pretty lame.

I'm perfectly happy to say Kirk is still kicking butt on UFS, in fact,
I'm ecstatic about that, I'm the guy who beat him up when he didn't
defend UFS at the LFS presentation (UFS is a much much nicer file system
and it's all about the allocation policy.  LFS doesn't really have one.
Works great for writing, sucks for reading.  Which do you do more?).
So go Kirk!

But the point being made was that I've been around the block, I've worked on
and/or looked hard at many different Unix variants and I'm not at all sad
to see them go.  Once upon a time it would have been great if SunOS 4.x 
had been open source, it was a much (and I mean MUCH) nicer place to start
than *BSD or Linux.  Much nicer.  But time has marched on and these days
I think that SunOS wouldn't be as viable.  And it's the only one that I
think would have had a chance and I work daily on all of them, we support
our product on 

	AIX
	IRIX
	Tru/64
	HP-UX
	Solaris
	SCO
	MacOS X

as well as all the free Unix variants.  Our build cluster is 35 platforms and
we get to deal with all the issues associated with all of them.  If I could
reduce that down to Linux, Windows, MacOS and Solaris I'd be happier.
-- 
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Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com