4BSD is dead???

[brett at wjvax.UUCP]

In article <6778 at utzoo.UUCP> henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Nah, 4BSD isn't dead, it just smells that way... :-)
>...
>>  What about a merger?  I work on a Masscomp system which is really pretty 
>>  nice: they have this universe stuff in which both 4.2 & SysV system calls
>>  can be supported...  Is there any chance of the various 4.x utils being
>>  merged into AT&T Unix?
>
>To some extent this is already in progress; a few things have filtered over.
>As far as the system calls... what ever happened to the idea that you should
>do things once, right, instead of supporting every possible variation?

That's well and good, but there is a crucial difference between features that
are implemented differently and features that are omitted.  For example,
I am involved in some software development that relies on the 4.2bsd
select() call, (select() blocks on multiplexed input). As near as I can tell,
SYSV allows NO way to block on input from more than one file descriptor, short
of doing a poll loop (yuch!).  Select() is a MAJOR feature missing from SYSV
(which apparently is part of V8).  If SYSV offered a comparable feature, even
with a different interface, I would be more than willing to #ifdef my code to
make it portable to SYSV.  But I can't, because the feature is missing from
SYSV.

In short, "doing something right" is not a good defense when major features have
been omitted -- they may not have been done right elsewhere, but that is no
justification for not doing them at all.

-------------
Brett Galloway
{pesnta,twg,ios,qubix,turtlevax,tymix,vecpyr,certes,isi}!wjvax!brett