instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Peter DaSilva]

> > [ME]
> [Guy Harris]
[Me: second try at replying]

> > Judging by how much stuff Bell broke when they came out with SV, and
> > judging by the fact that BSD is still sufficiently compatible that you
> > can run a V6 binary on it (2BSD, but 2 is source compatible with 4),
> 
> "V6 binary"?  What have you been smoking?  For one thing, 2BSD is V7, not V6

I know. I was referring to the V7 system as 2BSD, not the V6 one. I know what
2- and 4- BSD are. Hell, some of my code went out in one of the releases (I've
seen it at IUVAX).

> (I think 1BSD was the V6 Berkeley distribution), but, more importantly, you
> *can't* run V6 binaries on V7.  You don't even have a good chance of
> compiling *source* written for V6 on a V7 system and having it run.

At Berkeley there were several V6 programs that there was no source to. They
were running on a 2BSD system (ucbcory). QED.

> And there are programs written for V7 that will break when you try to
> compile them and run them under 4.2BSD...

Actually once you change RAW to CBREAK they're quite compatible. I've moved
stuff between V5, V6, and V7 with few problems. SIII and SV are a royal pain,
though.

> > even if it uses stty, I'd say it's Bell that's in the unstable computing
> > environment business.
> 
> If you're referring to the S3 terminal driver, from Bell's standpoint they
> didn't break anything.  It's compatible with UNIX 2.0 (or PWB/UNIX 2.0 or
> whatever the hell the release before UNIX 3.0 was).  The trouble is that the
> release that went out the door before System III was V7, not UNIX 2.0, which
> means the S3 driver's backward compatibility with UNIX 2.0 is totally
> useless to anybody outside the former Bell System.

And since most real world UNICES are V7 derived, what does that say about Bell?