gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (07/31/87)
I was really encouraged when I read Bing Bang's message about how
making the tty driver work required fixing the file system code, so he
did. The whole single threaded way that Minix FS works is a design
flaw; Bing seems to be fixing it, since some sort of fix is required to
allow access to devices that aren't as fast as disks; and AST is
complaining that he wants small diffs rather than a working tty? And
that since the Atari version is almost done, it too should remain
broken? Maybe Andy's interests and the Minix customers' interests
don't run together here. It sounds like Andy wants a stable system so
the book doesn't go obsolete soon, while the users want a system that
works; bug fixes over the net; and for Prentice-Hall to ship
the latest, working stuff, whether or not it matches the book, so
they can get a copy when they are tired of applying a thousand incompatible
diffs. If the code was free like GNU, somebody else could set up
an alternative distribution medium for the latest code, so you both could
get what you wanted. Sort of like Berkeley and AT&T maybe :-).
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