day@kovacs.UUCP (David Yost) (04/04/85)
I am getting increasingly frustrated with unix and the discussions on the net about bug after bug, many of which many of us have fixed and refixed year after year. It's time for something new. I want to create a newsgroup "net.nextbsd" where we can make constructive suggestions for improvements, cleanups, rewrites, and new features that we wish would come out in the next bsd. I hope Sys5-ers will form their own parallel news group, and I hope even more that someone from AT&T will listen to it and do the right things, as I expect Berkeley will with our group. 4.3 is being sewn up right now, so we would be talking about 4.4, and hopefully discussion would continue into later editions. I hope this could be a newsgroup where a lot of good ideas can be batted about, a place to transcribe good folklore. Word is that Berkeley is alive and kicking with another 3-year Arpa contract. This is probably great news. They have a good thing going, and I personally hope that they continue to do a lot of good things to 4.xbsd, even radical changes. Unix used to be interesting. Maybe it can still be. Many of us are running 4.2 on binary licenses, and it is hopeless to get most manufacturers to individually do much important work to unix. Berkeley serves the purpose of being the clearing house as well as the originator of the improvements we need, which the manufacturers will hopefully always adopt wholesale and make available to us. No bug discussions unless they are basic design problems that can eliminated by a different approach. Unix wizards only. --dave
david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) (04/09/85)
First. Shouldn't this discussion be in net.news.group? I've included
that group in the newsgroups for this posting at least.
Second.
We already have a gathering of unix-wizards (right here) for the
purpose of talking about unix. What would you do different on
a wish list group that couldn't be done here?
If you want some features, why not just talk about what you want.
If somebody is inspired by your idea then it'll eventually end
up in a kernel.
I for one would like dancing girls to cavort on my screen when I log in.
:-)
Another part of your posting was talking about system V and 4.2 as
if they are entirely different animals. Why should this be? One of the
strongest complaints about unix is the fact that there is that divergence.
But it's not good for portability. Though, it does give more than
one voice in the development. Oh well.
--
--- David Herron
--- ARPA-> ukma!david<@ANL-MCS> or david%ukma.uucp@anl-mcs.arpa
--- Or even anlams!ukma!david@ucbvax.arpa
--- UUCP-> {ucbvax,unmvax,boulder,oddjob}!anlams!ukma!david
--- cbosgd!ukma!david
"The home of poly-unsaturated thinking".guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (04/11/85)
> It's time for something new. I want to create a newsgroup > "net.nextbsd" where we can make constructive suggestions for > improvements, cleanups, rewrites, and new features that we > wish would come out in the next bsd. I hope Sys5-ers will > form their own parallel news group, and I hope even more that > someone from AT&T will listen to it and do the right things, > as I expect Berkeley will with our group. I hope that two parallel news groups are *not* formed; the continuation of two parallel streams of UNIX development which preserve all the annoying little differences between what BTL Research and the PWB/USG/USDL people did is as aggravating as the reappearance of old bugs. It's time we purged the "#ifdef USG" (or USDL or SYSV) from our code (as well as the "#ifdef BSD4_2"); it'd be nice if there was some basic set of capabilities (such as what's described in the System V Interface Definition) that works on *all* UNIX systems (with no exceptions). Guy Harris sun!guy