Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!rbthomas From: rbthomas@athos.rutgers.edu (Rick Thomas) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Direction of MINIX Message-ID: Date: 6 Jun 89 19:41:36 GMT References: <16546@louie.udel.EDU> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 54 First) Minix is clearly (as lots of people have said) heading in two different directions: The "teaching" version that runs on cheap XT clones, and supports only "small" programs; and the "hacker" version that runs on 32 bit hardware with multiple Megabytes of RAM and big hard disks and has a compiler that supports big programs. (What people with 80286 based machines will do is problematical.) Second) Andy has agreed to support the "teaching" version as an adjunct to keeping his book up to date. (He may not have thought of it in this way, but for the purposes of this message, that is what it amounts to.) He has announced his intention to bring the teaching version up (-: if "up" is the right word... :-) to POSIX compliance, and to keep it small in so doing. This will inevitably be accomplished at the expense of support for the "hacker" version. Third) There is (at present) no single person with an announced intention of supporting the "hacker" version of Minix to the extent of maintaining an "authorized" set of source code for it. Many people have made tremendous contributions to the effort, but there exists no "authoritative" collection of contributions that one can retrieve (over the net, by e-mail, by paper mail, or any other way) with a comprehensive index that allows one to pick and choose intelligently amongst the options. (The "bugs" archives are great (and we owe the maintainers a vote of thanks!) as far as they go, but they are much too large to be fully useful given the rather limited indexing technology that is available.) We need someone whom we all trust as much as we trust Andy, and who is as dedicated to maintaining the purity of the "hacker" version as Andy is to the "teaching" version. Finally) There are lots of things that would be nice to have in the "hacker" version of Minix (I have my own wish list: Large model compiler (would GCC fit this bill?), protected mode support, POSIX compliance, job-control (though I don't like the BSD way of doing it -- I personally think the System V way -- with the "shl" program providing multiple virtual terminals -- sort of a poor man's window system -- is cleaner -- but it needs a couple of features from BSD to round it out -- perhaps the POSIX people have a workable compromise), graphics support, and so on... We can debate the merits til the cows come home) but the first thing it needs is a "champion". Any volunteers? -- Rick Thomas uucp: {ames, cbosgd, harvard, moss, seismo}!rutgers!caip.rutgers.edu!rbthomas arpa: rbthomas@CAIP.RUTGERS.EDU