instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Peter DaSilva]

> course, a number of flamers against the S3/S5 driver haven't bothered doing
> the work of figuring out the (admittedly complex) interface...

First I had to FIND the interface. That's exactly my complaint. It's complex.
It's also well hidden (what in the hell is it doing in the administrator's
manual?????).

> (BTW, try porting an S5, S3 *or* V7 program which expects "read", "write",
> "wait", etc. system calls to be interrupted by signals to 4.2BSD.  You may
> get a little surprise...)

This is a problem, though non-interrupting signals are nice they should have
implemented it only in the new signal stack, leaving the old signals alone.
4.2 has 2 counts against it (signals and directories). SV has more than that.

> > > ...the S3 driver's backward compatibility with UNIX 2.0 is totally
> > > useless to anybody outside the former Bell System.
> > 
> > And since most real world UNICES are V7 derived, what does that say about
> > Bell?
> 
> It says that due to a mixture of technical and legal reasons they couldn't
> a) throw away the 2.0 compatibility in S3 replacing it with V7 compatibility
> or b) offer two versions of UNIX 3.0.1/S3.

Well, they should have made 2.0 compatible with V7 when it became obvious that
V7 was succeeding outside Bell, but... c) keep the V6 system call emulation
or change it to V7 emulation. Either would do.

> As for your claim that "most real world UNICES are V7 derived", I don't
> believe it.  Period.

Most real world UNICEs were installed before the SV interface definition came
out. But examples: UniPlus+ SIII is actually V7 with some SIII additions. So
is Xenix 3.0. The TRS80 Model 16 is an extremely common UNIX box. It's V7.

> Most commercial vendors are offering S3 or S5-based
> systems.

Most SIII systems are actually V7 plus SCCS, as noted above. This is why I
thought SIII was V7 compatible: all teh SIII systems I had used were actually
V7.

> they do poorly.  If anybody else wants to wage holy war over why their
> favorite version of UNIX is the "only true UNIX", could they please move the
> discussion to net.flame or net.religion.software?

You first.