Does Microport offer Updates to its users?

[dar]

 ... following up some comments by Bill Kennedy on Microport, in
particular, that he would avoid SVR4 from Microport because they
"no doubt would plaster their old buggy code all over it", or 
comments to that effect.

Having lived some of the experiences that Bill describes, I
sympathize with his views and won't challenge them.  But, there
is a technical difference with UNIX System V Release 4.0 (5.4)
that would allow Microport or anybody else to totally change
state into 5.4 space.

5.4 is by far the most complete "binary" UNIX from AT&T/Intel/etc
to date.  Earlier releases, notably the 3.0 with which Microport
started, required the vendor to create AT device drivers and
otherwise write and debug a *lot* of code.  Not nearly as much, 
of course, as in the *real* old days when one had to port a 
compiler, etc, but still, a lot of critical code.

These days, any source/sublicencing licensee of AT&T's for 5.4
can take the source release, say "makeunix" and have a true, 
complete binary release with all the latest commercial features
contributed by people like Interactive, Microsoft, SUN, Intel, 
and so on.  5.4 even supports a wide variety of commercial 
devices, disk controllers, video cards, etc, etc, and it comes
with *by far* the best documentation ever created for a binary
UNIX release.

Better still, 5.4 has been throroughly debugged by a team of
major-league systems companies, ISVs, UNIX distributors, and 
so on for over a year.  The latest, so-called "Developers" 
release issued by AT&T in my view is much, much more stable
and higher quality than the usual "production" releases from
other companies.

I'm not here to defend Microport, since I don't know anything
about the "new" venture, it's people or products, but I do
want to point out that they and any other distributor now 
have a very high quality option to distribute 5.4.  If anything,
if they are in fact distributing 5.4 the sheer logistics of 
doing anything other than reprinting the AT&T release would 
argue in favor of their product having the AT&T/Intel quality
intact.

Does anyone have any actual experience with the Microport or
UNIX House distributions of 5.4?

- Dimitri Rotow