Favorite operating systems query

[Barry Shein]

From: larry at geowhiz.UUCP (Larry McVoy)
>4) Crashing:  You bet it crashes.  Until you fix the bugs.  Even the people who
>   denied this said that if you added this or pushed that or diddled the other
>   thing it would crash.  Like I said, it crashes all the time.  Look at the 
>   list of bugs *known* about BSD Unix.  Look at tektronix, they claimed to 
>   have a port of 4.2 with over **2000** bug fixes.  2,000??? In a distribution
>   version of Unix?  Come on.  At CS here it took them 6 months to a year to 
>   get 4.2 to the point that it didn't crash each time the load got to 20 on a
>   780 (I know, I used that vax during the "fixing" period).

This statement is full of misconceptions:

1. 2,000 bug fixes almost certainly includes the couple of hundred
   associated UNIX utilities, not kernel bugs. That's also probably
   over a period of what? 3 years? Given VMS and all of its utilities
   AND the layered products you have to add on from other vendors to
   even approach UNIX's function (eg. word processing, RUNOFF ain't
   troff, you better add ALL the bug fixes in the last 3 years to
   TeX or Scribe plus its printer drivers or whatever you added to
   your VMS system to do text processing, also DEC's CMS, Fortran,
   Bliss, some graphics packages, DecNot, etc etc etc) you'd probably
   have AT LEAST 2,000 bug fixes. Not to mention the constant hackery
   Sys Mgrs have to do with things like logical names for every new
   package added to a VMS system, they just can't see the whole system's
   design is a bug.

   Let's face it, UNIX out of the box is sufficient for many, many
   applications, VMS out of the box is a sensory-deprivation environment,
   if I remember right you don't get much more than an assembler, editor,
   debugger and the kernel itself (and a few unsupported things.)

   Besides, you make *no* attempt to indicate that there *weren't* 2,000
   bug fixes in VMS since, oh, around when 3.0 was released, you just seem
   to assume this is true to prove your point, very weak.

2. It's clear you are comparing an original RESEARCH distribution
   of 4.2bsd with VMS. Get 4.2 these days from a serious vendor and
   see if your system crashes very often, it shouldn't. I seem to
   remember that the word on the street was that only a fool would
   run VMS4.0 before 4.1 came out because of the horrendous bugs,
   same basic thing except with UNIX you could probably fix a few
   bugs yourself and continue.

   Worse, without sources (see 3 below) your bugs had better be
   of interest to DEC or you'll get to sit on your hands while
   people have a ball cracking your system. Even when they're
   mildly interested it's rare to see a fix in less than months.

3. I've been over this availability of source for VMS before, check
   the Digital Reference Service under this product listing, you'll
   begin to doubt whether source is really available (is there a VMS
   SOURCE SITE anywhere out there?) First you'll notice your first
   $30K only buys kernel and a few things. The next $40K goes to Fortran,
   Decnet sources have no order number at all (or didn't last time I
   checked.) Then you notice this huge disclaimer that goes something like:
   Digital makes no guarantee that the sources provided will rebuild
   the system as distributed on the corresponding binary distribution.
   They further make no guarantee that you can even run the result of
   rebuilding their sources. In additon, only MAJOR RELEASES are available
   as source (eg. 4.0 but not 4.1, 4.2), if you wish the changes to be
   in your sources you can type them in yourself from the uFiche.
   Yeah, sounds like a good deal for $100K...(I also seem to remember
   they recommended strongly something like 1GB or more of free disk
   space to put the sources on and, being as it takes around 18 hours
   or more to re-build the kernel on a stand-alone 780 you had better
   throw a 780 CPU in with those disks, now add up the cost of sources.)

I think this discussion borders on useless simply because it is clear
the correspondants have almost exactly no real information and every
intent to misrepresent what little they have. Have fun. By the time
the correspondants settle down VMS will have gone the way of TOPS-20.

Yes, I dislike VMS, but at least I bothered to sit down and read the
DEC's product description before deciding whether sources were really
available etc.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University