[TUHS] Fwd: V7 RE

[Marc Donner via TUHS]

As I understand what Michael Lesk has said about UUCP, it was created to
bridge a three week gap before a full-fledged networking product was due to
be released by the product folks.  Somehow that sounds incredibly familiar.
=====
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On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 10:09 PM Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> 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
>