Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: System V Release 4.0 Developer Conferences Message-ID: <12248@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 27 Sep 88 17:53:50 GMT References: <167@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> <1988Sep22.173745.14647@utzoo.uucp> <8570@smoke.ARPA> <1988Sep26.213223.407@utzoo.uucp> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 50 I'd like to post a few comments on the ATT V.4 conferences. I haven't been yet, but have a few general comments. In article <1988Sep26.213223.407@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: | The kernels will be very big, probably needing a 16MB machine just to get | started. Nobody liked the sound of that. A Sun rep told me that it would run on our 4MB Sun/3 and 386i machines. He didn't know or wouldn't say about the Sun/2. | Training people to use and administer such a complex system will be | lengthy and difficult. I really doubt that the user will know or care what the kernel does. Certainly most of our users don't care if a file is local or NFS mounted. | There was inadequate detail on the commands that will be part of the | standard environment. I heard the same thing. | ABI implies that a conforming machine must have kernel support for both | NeWS *and* X. This is ridiculous for people who plan to run neither. I would expect most if not all of that to be in device drivers. ABI doesn't imply that all machine have all possible devices, as far as I can see. Programs from identical version of V.3 won't port if the needed hardware isn't supported. | The over-friendly system-administration interface isolates even the | knowledgeable administrator from what is really happening underneath. ATT seems to have gone from "having to know all the nuts and bolts" to making them inaccessible. | In general, overall, the system is not getting simpler or cleaner. Quite | the contrary: it is getting bloated, complex, and slow. It will be | difficult and expensive to run, support, and learn. It's not getting smaller, for sure. If the extra features are added in a modular fashion I would expect that it would be cleaner. Disclamer: I've identified the fact, comments, and opinions pretty clearly. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me