Not again (BSD etc. ports)

[John R. MacMillan]

|Right now, believe it or not, I have fallen under the beliefs of other
|long-term users.  Namely that there is not all that much wrong with
|3.51m unix.  There'd be too much lost by starting over again.

As a long term user myself, I agree that 3.51m is pretty good, and I
now have hope that we'll see a few tweaks I'd like (like support for
all 4 drives of JBM's HD2 card).

And I have to agree that if it happens it would be a LONG time before
any other port caught up in terms of being useful.  But I'm doing it
for the fun of it, and who knows, maybe that long time will come.  I
certainly don't expect to replace 3.51m with Minix in the near future,
but one of the goals I do have is to be able to boot either on my
machine.

|I'm
|saying that as someone who uses tape, ethernet, voice, combo, and
|sometimes dos cards.  Nobody has the specs for those things.  So I'd
|end up losing what I have.

There are descriptions in the Hardware Ref manual.  They're not as
complete as I'd like, but they're probably good enough.

|These are our kernel hackers.  People,
|there are only a few who are skilled at kernel.  Sure, anyone can
|write regular code, but stuff like drivers is different.

That's not really as true as you might think.  There's nothing magical
about OS code, it's just C like everything else, and it turns into
bits just like everything else.  It's harder to debug, and the bugs
can be more disastrous, but it's not a black art.

|Does anyone
|have not only the time and experience, but the machine to experiment
|on?

Yep. :-)

|Good question.  Everyone loves MGR (myself included) but to this date,
|nothing fancy has been written for it.

True.  As much as I love MGR, nifty applications for it are at the
bottom of my already too full project list.