instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases (absurdly long)

[Henry Spencer]

Come now, nobody said AT&T's stuff didn't have bugs, just that Berkeley
was worse.  Which even some long-live-Berklix independents openly admit.
If you caught Clem Cole's discussion of software distribution at Masscomp
in the panel discussion at Usenix, you may have noted that he said there
was often a quandary about which version of a utility to pick:  the one
from AT&T usually has more bugs fixed, while the one from Berkeley often
runs faster.

> And which file system is up to commercial standards? I think I have a
> lot more faith in 4.2 than the SYSV 4.1 clone (how come 4.2 sites don't
> even have an 'fsdb' [file sys debug], not because they never thought of
> it, they really don't need it.)

fsdb dates back to the days when *no* Unix filesystem was reliable, and
the automatic repair algorithms in fsck didn't exist.  Its existence in
SysV is more likely to be a relic of the past than a real reflection of
need, since even the V7 file system essentially never needed patching
given fsck.  (I speak as the sys admin of a V7 site, by the way.)

> Oh yeah, what about file system quotas? Completely missing in SYSV
> ... Or, again,
> is avoiding filled file systems just not something of interest to
> 'commercial' environments...

The lack of file system quotas probably reflects AT&T's openly-expressed
view (which I agree with) that except in special situations, if you think
you need disk quotas then you really need more disks instead.  Situations
involving hostile users, e.g. undergrads, are obviously an exception --
note that this was the original motive for the 4.2 implementation of
quotas -- but how many businesses have that problem?

> And unbundling everything useful is a real strong point...

As many people have pointed out, unbundling (a) is a botch, and (b) is
necessary if you are selling Unix boxes with small disks.  Not everybody
has Eagles to put it all on.  Whether AT&T's unbundling strategy is
rational, even given this excuse, is another question... but it is not
totally without reason.

> ... maybe what I don't understand about commercial sites is
> that they're too stupid to take something for free when they can pay
> extra for the same thing...

Pray tell, how can a binary-only licensee (most commercial sites do not
have source, remember) get these things for free?  I know quite a few
binary-only sites that would love to know.

> A -v arg to cat so it doesn't screw your terminal and a -C arg to ls so
> you have a chance to to actually see more than 20 files, I can
> understand your objections, but don't you think my list is a *little*
> more important....honestly?

Since I think both cat -v and ls -C are botches, I agree.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry