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From: roberto@cwi.nl (Rob ten Kroode)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Minix's Direction (was Re: Brucee's opus)
Message-ID: <8167@boring.cwi.nl>
Date: 6 Jun 89 14:40:10 GMT
References: <16497@louie.udel.EDU> <11989@bcsaic.UUCP> <2775@munnari.oz> <798@gara.une.oz>
Sender: news@cwi.nl
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
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In article <798@gara.une.oz> wtoomey@gara.une.oz (Warren Toomey) writes:
>BTW, speaking of Minix design, what about job control and the extra
>Berkely signals for Minix. This will allow shells etc, to have better
>control over child processes, and won't be incompatible with the
>Version 7 & SysV signals - well, perhaps a few! Any ideas, comments?

When Minix was just out I added job control and all necessary signals to Minix.
I had only one problem: testing it :-) I needed some sort of shell with
job control. I had no such (public domain) beast that was small enough to
run under minix, and I had no time to write one. 

I asked Andy some advise, and he told me that he didn't like the idea of 
job control in Minix. In fact, he isn't too fond of any Berkeleyism (sp?) 
at all :-(  I guess that these kinds of changes/additions shouldn't appear in
the vanilla Minix version that should be used as a teaching OS.

About the direction of Minix; I think it is impossible to keep only one version.
There definitely should be the OS teaching tool: the current version (should
be POSIX compatible). Besides that version there will evolve a second version:
the Minix for the hackers. A cheap, well written unix system which you can 
really use for applications. For the latter version Bruce's patches are a
good step in the right direction. 

Comments?

-- 
                                  |
Rob ten Kroode (roberto@cwi.nl)   |         Don't read this !! 
                                  |
"When they said 'sit down' I stood up",  Growing up - Bruce Springsteen