UUCP Port Turnaround

[guy at gorodish.UUCP]

>> You should try the kernel hack on a decent system before dismissing it.
>
>I guess it's just the Berkeley philosophy to do things in the kernel
>whenever possible, even when it's not necessary.

Oh, good grief!

1) The change was made by Sun, not Berkeley; if you'd read Rick
Adams' article carefully, you would have seen that.

2) There are plenty of things in plenty of kernels that don't,
strictly speaking, *have* to be there.  Why is file name to i-number
translation in the UNIX kernel?  Why is canonical-mode tty processing
in the UNIX kernel?  It is certainly *convenient* to put them there,
because it means that applications don't need to do those things
themselves, and they can share common code to do this.  The very same
thing can be said about arbitrating access to dial-in/dial-out lines.
Putting it in the kernel (and it's *not* a lot of code, believe me -
probably less than 1KB, and probably less than the code you have to
add to the system if you don't do it in the kernel!)  means that, as
Rick pointed out, you *don't* have to modify "getty" or "uucp" or
anybody else that wants to dial out.

3) Casually claiming that there's some kind of "Berkeley philosophy"
that "puts things into the kernel whenever possible" may be
satisfying, but it's not true.  What are these "things" you're
referring to?