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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: Berkeley Flames and ihuxx!ignatz
Message-ID: <1383@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Nov-83 10:57:25 EST
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1383
Posted: Thu Nov 10 10:57:25 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Nov-83 02:43:49 EST
References: <272@decvax.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 25

There are rumors that 4.3BSD will require a System V license, and as such it
may have a lot of the USG UNIX tools (SCCS and the like).  The USG tty ioctls
are a clean-up of the V7 ones; they permit you to do things you just can't
do with the V7/4.xBSD ones.  Since Berkeley has been trying to clean up other
old kludges in 4.2BSD perhaps they should either do the USG ioctls or a new
set which are a superset of both (they are very similar in general concept
so this wouldn't be too big a set) and implement both the V7/4.xBSD ones
and the USG ones as subsets.  They've already picked up the USG "open" call
(superior to the old V7 one) and the USG "fcntl" call (which is USG cleaning
up a lot of old kludges), so perhaps something like this with the TTY driver
would be nice.

In effect, 4.xBSD is "V7 (32/V, actually) muchly cleaned up, with virtual
memory".  4.2 is quite a bit more of a radical departure from V7/32V than
4.1 was, but I suspect a lot of programs go over without major change.
If 4.3BSD were "System V (System VI) muchly cleaned up, with
virtual memory", with no more incompatibility between it and USG than there
currently is between 4.2BSD and V7/32V, and with some backward compatibility
stuff for V7/32V/4.1BSD (USG UNIX doesn't have any stuff for backward
compatibility with the stuff that changed from V7, which is sometimes a
nuisance), that would probably make both camps as happy as is possible.  It
wouldn't be perfect but I suspect perfection isn't possible here.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy