Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari!muller
From: muller@munnari.oz (Paul Muller)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Bruce Evans' opus
Summary: Free-for-all comment on future Minix?
	 and "Who is this God (AST) person anyway?"
	 .
Message-ID: <2775@munnari.oz>
Date: 4 Jun 89 11:58:07 GMT
References: <16497@louie.udel.EDU> <11989@bcsaic.UUCP>
Lines: 64



Firstly I apoligise to anyone offended by the summary line....

I think it is rather inconsiderate to talk about Minix as if it was
collectively owned by the netlanders (although much of it would not exist
without them and they all deserve credit), Andrew and PH will differ on
that point no-doubt about it, though as ast so wonderfully put it, there
would appear to be a "fork" in the road after the work of Bruce hit the net.

Minix first and foremost is the poor student's teaching OS. It serves its
purpose above and beyond the call of duty, and that is the point. If you
were a student you wouldn't fancy wading through all those #ifdefs for two
days just to find you made a mistake early on in the code and that's why
none of what the lecturer is saying fits together. I am a student and find
nothing more annoying than conditional compilation, it ruins your day and
often clouds the purpose of the code.

I am not going to propose anything radical in regards as to what should be
done, I will just try and put together some ideas that have floated across
the battle table (and try to foresee new ones).
    The first idea is to KISS. Sounds nice huh? ;-) Seriously, the first
thing is to get a standard piece of PC code that will form the kernal (in
the larger sense) of the Minix book. Much as it is now. Students can still
boot up on the two floppy PCs they have at home and happily hand in work
for the teacher with the knowledge that comes from looking at the guts of
an OS. 1.4a contains more or less than what is needed to do this. POSIX
compliance is probably important from the point of view of teaching the
ideas in a real world sense (we can't always patch the C compiler!).
    The second is the 'upmarket' Minix that everyone seems to think is so
important, why? Most people who got into Minix for reasons other than formal
education just wanted to 'hack around', you were happy with Minix then, why
not now, the old case of "give an inch take a mile" or more "too much of a]
good thing" :-) The idea then is to produce a bunch of either, patches or
modules (FS,MM,xx_wini,etc) that cater for individual tastes and needs.
People can then make up a Minix system to suit them, you could have a file
in /etc that would list all options loaded or have an internal table hard
coded into Minix that would tell applications if they could use certain
features or not at compile (or patch) time.

If people are so into the idea of 'real life' Unix, then checkout AT&T, SCO,
etc offerings. They produce different BINARIES for each processor they
support, most proabably different sources as well. Xenix (tm) 286 won't
run 386 code, so why all the hoopla about Minix compatibility? What is
needed is some form of arbitration committee to decide what goes in the
upmarket version. This should not just rest on ast's shoulders, I prefer
he gets more time to write his great books! :-)

    The whole idea is asking for trouble, but there are sooooo many things that
poeple in the Minix user community want/need/loath/despise in minix that can be
done on paper but fall done trying to fit in with the 'small is beutiful' model
, Virtual memory, windowing, memory model work, swapping and networking just
to name a few.

    I like what Bruce and others are doing for Minix, but the seminal idea
of ast's based itself on V7, "because of its simplicity and elegance" and this
is foremost in my mind when I hear talk about changing the listing that will
appear in the back of the second revision of The Book.

What do others feel? The ST was a step in another direction, what do users
of ST AND PC (that is people who have used (are using) both) think about
the differences in the code/machine?

paul