cak@PURDUE.ARPA (11/11/83)
From: Christopher A Kent <cak@PURDUE.ARPA> Since my mini-flame seems to have precipitated this whole series of Anti-Berkeley flames, I want to make a few things clear. First off, I write these things with the usual personal opinion caveats; they represent my view and my view alone. Period. Secondly, I have an incredible amount of respect and praise for Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels, and the cast of (apparently) thousands that have made 4.2 possible. Without the code that they have produced over the life of the DARPA project, I would probably still be running 32/V, or worse, be living on a pdp-11. V6 was nice, but. My comments came after a particularly arduous session of debugging a particular portion of my 4.2 release, only to look at my mail and find that someone had just re-discovered some fixes I had done a week ago, and that they had fought my current battle a week ago. I probably fell into the trap of thinking of Berkeley as a support organization for just about long enough to type that flame and send it off. [Mea Culpa]*1000. It was wrong, and I admit it. I sit in a situation similar to theirs and the one described by Randy Frank, except on a smaller scale, and I understand. I was off base. However, much of what I say still holds true. I don't have a copy of my note, but perhaps with minor changes, much of it would hold through. I don't want or need hand-holding; what I want is a good way for 4.2 licensees to be able to exchange bug reports and fixes in a timely manner. It isn't fair to expect Berkeley to provide this; they aren't being paid for it and don't have the manpower. I realize all that. But there is still a need. The fixes seem to filter to Berkeley before anywhere else; they do collect them and peruse them; it would be nice if we could see the results of that action. This isn't currently possible for the great majority of 4.2 licensees, and I'd like to see that change. It is possible to get help out of UCB, but it is often slow to come (understandably). This is a whish list item, mind you; I'm not saying that it is what SHOULD be, it is what would be NICE. If Berkeley can't devote the manpower to it, perhaps they would be willing to let someone else do so. A lot of people are out there testing combinations of hardware and software that Berkeley can't possibly be expected to have on site, and fixing problems that crop up; for licensing reasons, Unix-Wizards is not an appropriate place to discuss many of these; we need another way. The Usenix newsletter used to be a good forum for this; that seems to have fallen by the wayside, too. (More about that in another flame someday, perhaps). I hope I have smoothed any ruffled feathers, cleared up my good name, and made clear my original intentions. I am eternally glad I have 4.2; AT&T doesn't seem to understand what a large number of Universities and other DARPA contracters want, and Berkeley seems to. I'm glad we have a choice, or I'd be cursing and pulling my hair out and writing TCP/IP for SysV, just like a lot of other folks. Cheers, chris ----------