25 Apr
2015
25 Apr
'15
2:17 a.m.
On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
While it was (more or less) BSD 4.3, a bunch of
libraries and functions
were for some reason kept at the BSD 4.2 level. Typical of this was syslog,
for instance.
?That was a awful argument at DEC, BSD (like Linux today) was a source
distribution so were not encumbered by binary compatibility (much less API
compliance) between different release [I remember Bill Joy once saying that
it thought it was good that people were forcd to recompile so their
programs did not get bit rot].
I also remember in the late 1970s at a USENIX, Bill Munson who ran "TIG"
the Merrimack, NH team that supported AT&T; saying be careful; if DEC
starts to "support" unix we will do bad things to it (including putting
Cobol on it). He predicted this war you described (and they did put Cobol
on it too). It was hard to keep binaries running and change interfaces.
Do DEC management chose to keep the ABI for Ultrix pretty much 4.3.