instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Peter DaSilva]

> > [ME]
> [Guy Harris]
[ME]

> > Judging by how much stuff Bell broke when they came out with SV, and
> > judging by the fact that BSD is still sufficiently compatible that you
> > can run a V6 binary on it (2BSD, but 2 is source compatible with 4),
> 
> "V6 binary"?  What have you been smoking?  For one thing, 2BSD is V7, not V6

I never said it wasn't. The V7 was an early 2BSD release. The V6 was vanilla
V6 (the Berkeley comp center is terribly conservative. They still had one
machine running V5!).

> (I think 1BSD was the V6 Berkeley distribution), but, more importantly, you
> *can't* run V6 binaries on V7.  You don't even have a good chance of
> compiling *source* written for V6 on a V7 system and having it run.

I have run V6 binaries on V7. I was at berkeley when the V6/V7 switch was
going on and this was the only way to get certain traditional programs for
V7. We were also running an RSX (!) version of basic+, suitably patched.
Source for V6 ran on V7 with very few problems (had to change RAW to CBREAK,
that was about all).

> And there are programs written for V7 that will break when you try to
> compile them and run them under 4.2BSD...

Yes, but it's a hell of a lot easier to fix them for 4.2 than for 

> > even if it uses stty, I'd say it's Bell that's in the unstable computing
> > environment business.
> 
> If you're referring to the S3 terminal driver, from Bell's standpoint they
> didn't break anything.  It's compatible with UNIX 2.0 (or PWB/UNIX 2.0 or
> whatever the hell the release before UNIX 3.0 was).  The trouble is that the
> release that went out the door before System III was V7, not UNIX 2.0, which
> means the S3 driver's backward compatibility with UNIX 2.0 is totally
> useless to anybody outside the former Bell System.

And since V7 and derivatives is the most common UNIX in the real world...

> 	Guy Harris

Peter da Silva