Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwvax!tank!mimsy!jds
From: jds@mimsy.UUCP (James da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Bruce Evans' opus
Message-ID: <17772@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: 27 May 89 16:02:38 GMT
References: <2570@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: jds@mimsy.umd.edu (James da Silva)
Organization: University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 48

In article <2570@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
> According to P-H's sales figures, the PC version of MINIX is still 
> outselling the AT version by a wide margin.  This means that there are a
> lot of 8088s still out there.  Consequently, I am going to base V2.x on
> 1.4a, not on Bruce's version.  I just don't want all that extra complexity
> on the 8088 (remember, the goal was a teaching system).

While I personally plan on running Bruce's version, I agree with Dr.
Tanenbaum.  `Teaching Minix' as shipped from Prentice Hall doesn't need to
have all the bells and whistles.  It also doesn't need to be POSIX compatible
where such compatibility would complicate Minix.  Keep it simple!

However, I urge Dr. Tanenbaum to look very closely at Bruce's changes.  Many
are bug fixes and improvements that have nothing to do with protected mode.
It would be silly to ignore so many fixes.  Bruce documented every change he
made to each source file in the CHANGES file present in every directory; I
would say that this is probably the best-documented Minix update I've seen.
Much better than the 1.2 and 1.3 updates.

> This means that if you convert to Bruce's system now, you may have 
> trouble converting to 2.x (POSIX-based) later.  It is clearly up to you
> which way you go, but at least you should be aware that there is a fork
> in the road here.

I think that the people of the net will help here as they have in the past.
I did an upgrade kit for Minix 1.2, Vince Broman did one for 1.2 and one for
1.3d.  There's no reason to think that others will not do the same in the
future.

This should go without saying, but those people serious about keeping track
of changes that come over the net while making their own mods should be using
a revision control system.  I use the SVC system posted here a while back;
there has also been a port of RCS to Minix.  I've got Minix 1.1, 1.2, 1.3d,
1.4a and Evans' patches all online and easily accessible.

Those with 386's or better will most likely borrow more and more from the
GNU project; what Prentice Hall does with Minix five years from now just
doesn't seem relevent to me, for OS hacking or `learning Unix cheaply'.

There will still be a need for a teaching OS, and I trust that Dr.
Tanenbaum will provide an excellent one.

> Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)

Jaime
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: domain: jds@mimsy.umd.edu				     James da Silva
: path:   uunet!mimsy!jds