ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (05/30/88)
I have received more response to my query about whether floppies are still in use. Although not many individuals have them at home, there are a number of universities that have rooms full of them for students. The main tradeoff is space. For example, if I put scanf.c in libc.a, then the amount of space on the RAM disk is reduced by 5 blocks, so that you can't compile fsck any more. Things are that tight. What I would suggest floppy users do is go through the RAM disk stuff carefully, and delete files from /bin or routines from /lib/libc.a to make enough space to compile the system. (Un)fortunately, the number of binaries has grown so large that you need two full floppy disks for /usr/bin and /user/bin now. Obviously you will have to make a choice about what you want to keep online and what not. Still, I will make every effort to see that you can recompile the system on a PC with 2 floppies. I forget if I have posted the following information, although I certainly have told many people by mail. The 1.3 C compiler is not changed from the 1.2 compiler. Finally, as my mail volume edges upward, so does the amount of mail that gets rejected due to flakey mail systems somewhere in the world. If you send me the kind of mail for which an answer could be reasonably expected, and you don't get one within a week, assume that I replied, the replied was rejected by some host, and I gave up. You should send the mail again, along with your exact path starting at mcvax or uunet. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) P.S. There is a mini-discussion of Xinu vs MINIX going on in comp.os.xinu, in case anyone is interested in following it or contributing.