/usr size in future release of ultrix?

[Peter Kocks]

Many people have mentioned problems with programs and features of
ultrix, but many of the solutions seem to be at the expense of disk
space.  

Is there a long term policy at DEC on the amount of disk space its
operating system should occupy or is it just going to increase
forever?

As it is now, we cannot fit the entire 3.x operating system (inluding 70
Megs for local programs such as emacs) on one 300 Meg drive.   In
order to install 4.x, I will need to repartition the disks on 6 dec
3100s--a major task.  My question is: how big should I make the /usr
a partition?  150 Megs, 250 Megs, or an entire 300 Meg DISK!!!!!

Does anyone have any experience it just eliminating a lot of the dec
supplied programs?  For example, I am thinking of canning the entire
dec windows routines and replacing them with another xdx (?) and
running twm (Tom's window manager) on top of it.

Have you ever noticed that /usr/bin/dxvdoc (I relatively simly and for us
mostly useless program) takes almost 3 Megs? Why?  If microsoft can
install an entire word processor in 800 K, why does a document viewing
program take almost 3 Megs?  Have they forgotten to "/bin/strip" the
code?  Am I missing something very basic here?

I am considering just forgetting about all future upgrades on the dec
machines and just leaving them at 3.1.  Is there any reason why I
should not do this?

Why cannot DEC just release bug fixes to ultrix, instead of releasing
new and rediculously large versions of its operating system?

--Peter Kocks
  pkocks at chemistry.stanford.edu