Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mdisea!mitchell From: mitchell@MDI.COM (Bill Mitchell) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Message-ID: <1991May12.143246.18877@MDI.COM> Date: 12 May 91 14:32:46 GMT References: <9864@star.cs.vu.nl> <9911@star.cs.vu.nl> Organization: Motorola, Mobile Data Division - Seattle, WA Lines: 73 In article <9911@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: > > I don't care about how big the programs are when they >are in memory. What I care about is how big they are on the distribution >disks. I've seen Andy express concern over the number of disks running the cost of the distribution up several times. As I recall, some useful utilities were omitted from the distribution at some point to save a disk or two. I've also seen concern about increasing the complexity of the system, and shared libraries would add complexity. How about making the distribution format a bit more flexible, offering a stripped-down distribution with minimum disks at minimum cost and offering add-ons separately. If PH doesn't want to deal with the add-ons, perhaps they could distribute just the stripped-down (PH Copyright?) material, and other distribution channels could be developed for the rest. NLMUG might cover holland and maybe other european countries. Wasn't there a similar organization in the UK which was distributing minix materials? Austin Code Works and various Shareware distributers here in the US would probably be interested in this. I think PH probably has too much inertia to handle the OS add-ons and contributed/ported applications effectively anyway. Someone other than Andy (NLMUG?) could administer "the rest" and perhaps provide one distribution channel, with other distribution channels getting master distribution kits from whoever administers them and duplicating them for further distribution. The big complication here is version control, keeping upgrades and applications which are sensitive to minix release versions in sync, and keeping universal applications separated from those which require one or more OS upgrades (eg. 386 support). That's work which the administrators and distributers have to do, and which they can be compensated for by charging for the disks. The distribution format might run something like this: Orderable from PH: OS and key utility binaries OS and key utility sources OS and key utility documentation OS and key utility binaries and sources OS and key utility binaries and documentation OS and key utility sources and documentation OS and key utility binaries, sources and documentation Orderable from PH or some other source, with ordering information provided in PH materials: 386 upgrade kit, allowing programs larger than 64+64 smart scheduler kit multi-threaded FS kit (if one appears and gains acceptance) Hard disk boot utilities (shoelace, etc.) expanded utilites selections kermit, indent, basic, pascal, forth, lisp, pcomm, crisp, elvis, eliza, wmail, smail, uucp, rn, and whatever else gains general acceptance Maybe I'm dreaming, but this seems to me a workable scheme which allows an uncomplicated minix system distributed by PH on a minimum number of disks and easily controlled by Andy and PH; plus a channel for distributing upgrades and add-ons which is not constrained by desires to keep internals simple or to minimize the number of disks and which has a chance to be more effective than the present near-anarchy. Am I dreaming, or could this work? -- mitchell@mdi.com (Bill Mitchell)