guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (01/13/91)
>Amiga Unix enhances the AT&T release with Amiga-specific features, and >commonly used public domain software (like Emacs and netnews, for >example). Well, I guess "netnews" is sufficiently stable that doing so might not be a bad idea (I assume it includes B news rather than C news). One of the reasons Sun *removed* netnews from SunOS in 3.0 was that 4.2BSD provided B news source, but unfortunately the version that was provided contained the infamous "line-eater" bug. This meant that lots of 4.2BSD sites joined USENET with a version of netnews containing that bug, because that version was "already there", while they'd have to go find a version that didn't have it. I suspect that contributed to the longevity of that bug. If you force people to go out and find netnews source, they might be more likely to get a later and possibly more bug-free version, and might also be more likely to track any fixes distributed for it.