AIX (is it unix)?

[Guy Harris]

>Note that Mt Xinu itself (where Melinda Shore is posting from) has
>chosen to take BSD and add SysV functionality to it, rather than doing
>the opposite.  I'm sure it is for a very simple reason:  SysV simply
>does not have the capability to provide everything that BSD provides.
>The reverse is easily true.

This depends on what you mean by "have the capability to provide
everything...".  Yes, you'd have to hack the S5 source code to provide
the capabilities that BSD provides, but you have to hack the BSD source
code to provide the capabilities that S5 provides.  It may be *easier*,
by and large, to do the latter, but that's a different matter; once
you've done either one, what you have isn't "S5" or "BSD", strictly
speaking, and frankly I'd prefer a well-done modified system of that
sort to either vanilla S5 *or* BSD.

BTW, S5R4 should handle most, if not all, of what you list above, given
that it'll support both the V7/S5 and BSD file systems (the latter
complete with long file names and quotas), a tty driver with a nicer
BSD-style user interface (derived from the SunOS 4.x one), some form of
network mailer (whether "sendmail"-derived, UPAS-derived, or both, I'm
not sure), and "#!" (to handle the 3 shells - Bourne, C, and Korn -
which I expect S5R4 to have).  (I'm surprised you didn't list job
control - which S5R4 will have as well.)

It should also have a dynamic linking mechanism complete with a
programmatic interface (hopefully sufficient to replace 90% of the
dynamic linking code used by e.g. the "class" stuff in Andrew), and a
pseudo-tty driver that lets the program on the master side listen for
"ioctl"s on the client side, neither of which current BSD releases have,
although I hope 4.4BSD has both of them.