4BSD is dead???

[Henry Spencer]

> > ...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?
> 
> "What happened" is that people wrote code to use the 4.2 socket system
> calls, or the S5 IPC system calls (to cite a couple of your favorite
> bugbears), and those people aren't in a mood to change their code to use
> some Wonderful New set of system calls which Do Things Right.

Actually, I wasn't thinking so much of the IPC stuff, which is indeed a
difficult problem, as of all the other incompatibilities.  For those,
would it be too much to ask that people relink their code with a special
library (given that they'll probably have to recompile to get their stuff
to run on the machine at all) which emulates system X's system calls using
system Y's system calls?  Instead of having to put both in the kernel?

As for people who've written code and don't want to change it...  Do those
people expect to upgrade to 4.4BSD when it arrives?  If so, they'd better
brace themselves for another almighty sh*tload of gratuitous incompatibility,
because last I heard Berkeley had made it quite clear that 4.3->4.4
compatibility was most unlikely.  The real solution to this mess, of course,
is that you isolate the stuff that depends on such things in as small a
portion of code as possible, so that you DON'T have to rewrite from scratch
when some crazed Berkloid bit-hacker or USG programming zombie does something
stupid.	 (Have I offended everybody yet? :-)

"I've got all these 7094 Fortran programs that run just fine on the 7094
emulator on my old IBM 360/65.  You mean to say I'm going to have to change
them to run on a Celerity machine under Unix?  That's outrageous."

> I agree that
> there's a lot of crap in all current versions of UNIX ...
> but I don't think you can abolish it all by fiat.

Of course, if you don't make some attempt to abolish it, you end up living
with it forever.  The more patient you are with it, the worse the problem
gets, too.

"Backward compatibility means never being able to say 'that was a mistake'."
-- 
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revenue from otherwise-unused	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
late-night phone capacity.	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry