I'll do that.
You should look at the canonical tuhs archive at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/
Excellent. Thanks for the confirmation.So far as I can figure out (and I'm a little bit fuzzy around the edges), this appears to be patch level 431, at least according to https://tuhs.v6shell.org/UnixArchiveMirror/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/VERSION. I have a number of questions that hopefully, someone can shed some light on:
1. Is it really pl 431?
Yes. It is.
2. How can I tell?
VERSION is always updated, so it is. If you are in doubt, you can look at the patch files that's at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patches/ and they all update VERSION.
When folks 'regenerate' the tape, is it simply a matter of writing to the tape device from the patched disk inside the 211BSD instance or are there some arcane activities involved?3. Is it the latest tape image available (I've seen plenty of disk images, but those are already installed)?
Yes. Well, almost. https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD_patch457/ has a tape that's updated to 457, lacking only the last 12 changes. A most current tape hasn't been regenerated, at least in the archives. A quick search of github shows there's a few PiDP-11 oriented versions but I've not looked closely at them.
Nice. You said something like this the other day, but at the time, I didn't quite get how relevant it would be. Now that I understand what you're talking about, it sounds great.4. Is there a howto bring it up to the next patch level document lying around somewhere?
There's two or three efforts to create shell scripts to apply the patches. I've not looked closely at them all yet...I've seen Warner's work on going the other direction and that's fascinating in it's own right, but I'd like to see about patching up to latestWhen my work is done, there will be a github repo that has all the changes applied, one at a time which can be used to generate context diffs or something else that can be pushed to the PDP-11s that can be updated.
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