[TUHS] Fwd: V7 RE

[Douglas McIlroy via TUHS]

I don't remember how it was decided that the time had come for another
edition. I volunteered to edit volume 1 of the manual. Andrew Hume
took on volume 2, which ultimately split into 2A and 2B. We exercised
some judgment about what should be in userland, wheedled contributions
to the manual out of folks, and prodded fixes that would minimize the
man-page BUGS sections. Maybe we rated the title of release
provocateurs.

As always in Unix, no one had ultimate authority. The most vivid
example in v7 is that I didn't want uucp with its known security
holes, but Mike Lesk could not be persuaded to work on closing them.
It finally was included on the premise that it posed no new danger
since it was already in widespread use.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 11:08 AM
Subject: Re: V7 RE
To: srb gmail <srbourne at gmail.com>
Cc: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu>


Thank you.  Fair enough. I was sure you had been heavily involved.
Doug, your memory?

On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 9:53 AM srb gmail <srbourne at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   "As I understand it, Dennis did not want to be the "release
> engineer" for V7 (I believe srb put it together), but since V7 was going to
> go outside of Bell to the "general population" in the CS research
> community, it seemed like that was a good time to take back some it (by V8
> they stopped trying and Research and Summit diverged)."
>
> Hi Clem, I did some of the release engineering for V7.  Wrote scripts to make sure the release tree had
> src, bin and man pages and some other cleanup and checks.  Doug I think was the official RE but he would
> probably remember better than me.
>
> Steve