4.2 progressive or dead end

[dave at uwvax.ARPA]

We run 4.2bsd.  Despite the bugs (we had 4.1bsd and were constantly fixing
bugs in it too -- buggy Berkeley code is nothing new) people here seem happy
with it.  Why did we change over?  Networking, mostly.  The networking code
we had for 4.1 was really bad, we were happy to be rid of it.  Also, it's
nice to be compatable with other ARPAnet sites.  The faster filesystem has
also made a difference.  The conversion wasn't really a big pain, though now
that we are here with 4.2, the local software has increased dramatically,
making any further changes more difficult.  Remember, all you Bell System *
lovers, Sys 3/5 don't do paging, and most likely never will (at least on a Vax),
Bell is making its own computers now -- no paging makes it tough to run
5 Mbyte processes with only 4Mbytes memory.  For all of you uucp hackers, we
haven't had any problems with uucp (though we don't call out -- except over
hard lines).  Sendmail is very nice (although the configuration file is
now the easiest thing to understand) -- it even parses most RFC822 addresses.
There is also a file locking mechanism -- if you want to use it.  The disk
quotas have been nice too -- we use them extensively on our instructional
systems -- no more full filesystems here.  Also 4.2 allows you to be a member
of multiple groups at the same time -- this has come in handy.  Longer
filenames is nice too (no more 14 char limit).

I must admit that they did something strange to signals -- and Berkeley
also seems to have forgotten that many programs can run setgid() instead
of setuid() if all they are looking for is file security.

Overall though, I think we'll keep it.

Dave Cohrs @ wisconsin (yes, we're getting 2.9 for our 11/70 too)
-- 

Dave Cohrs
...!{allegra,heurikon,ihnp4,seismo,uwm-evax}!dave
dave at wisc-rsch.arpa