[ On Saturday, March 18, 2000 at 11:07:43 (-0800), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: rc.d
>
> I will again restate for the record, though:  Those of you who think that
> the UI doesn't have anything to do with what is a BSD system are quite
> WRONG.  The UI, the API and the kernel are all very much linked into the
> definition of an OS.

Temporally speaking that's a very narrow view of the world of Unix.

Perhaps you should boot the V7 emulator on your fastest machine and do
all your work from within V7 for a few days.  Then, if you can, jump all
the way forward to something like the most recent AIX release.  I think
you'll come to appreciate that "unix" in general has a far deeper
meaning that transcends all the SysV vs. BSD nonsense.  Taking a
"rascist" view about what's best and trying to lump a bunch of nebulous
things into far too few categories isn't very productive in terms of
building an even better system.  To paraphrase what's been stated
several times already, "If you don't like improvements and modernisation
then go find yourself a VAX and boot 4.2BSD."  Saying that "cat doesn't
have -v so it isn't *my* unix" (or vice versa) isn't really very
meaningful -- there are far to many variations on all sides of the
many-dimentional unix fence to allow anyone to be very successful at
saying that any one collection of features is "BSD" and all the rest are
not.  Heck why not go back and see what 2BSD was (it'll boot on the
PDP-11 emulator) before you try and say what "BSD" is and isn't.

As kre said BSD died a while ago and the unique collection of people who
made BSD what it was have dispersed and there can be no "BSD way" any
more without being stuck on the past and living with nostalgia.

BTW, if you want a cold hard factual way to define what's BSD and what
isn't I'd suggest looking at the book that best defines it, i.e. "The
Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" and maybe
doing something like counting the percentage of pages that talk about
innards and APIs vs. the percentage of pages that talk about which
getty, init, and su you have on top of the system.  Looks like about
0.1% is in the administrative interface if you ask me....

> Now, onward...

Yes, exactly!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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