2 Jan
2017
2 Jan
'17
1:33 a.m.
MacOS is the best of a bad lot, in my opinion. Unix at the core and as a result pretty
well able to withstand attacks from the outside world. For a desktop OS, not too bad.
Linux is to diversified at this point to make it to the desktop any time soon. As a server
OS it is a wonderful thing and I am willing to work with it there any time. Though the
differences between Linux A and Linux B are sometimes grating on my ability to get the
code I am paid to work on running in all environments.
Windows is just broken. Yes, it is getting better (for some definition of better) with
each release. The ability to hack and attack usually has this common vector. It is usually
chosen by some IT guy because the initial cost is low and it is what they got trained to
use sometime in history.
As to Doug Gwyn and The BRL code, I ported all of that onto an early Celerity release.
Celerity was 4.2 and I did the port to get the feature set that some customers were
clamoring for. And Ron, you may have been the one to send me your patches for the Bourne
shell way back when. I do remember doing that integration for Celerity as well.
David
On Jan 1, 2017, at 5:56 AM, Tim Bradshaw
<tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
Yes, I know it's Mach: I really meant the userland and (to a smaller extent) the
system calls. Given my aim of a desktop machine on which to live that's actually all
I care about: if I have to worry about the guts of the kernel then the system has failed
to provide what I need from it.
On 1 Jan 2017, at 13:01, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> OS/X (Mac) is Mach-derived I think you do it a disservice to call it BSD-derived.
While the kernel-to-application interface was compatible with 4.2 BSD, the kernel is
largely of CMU’s only creation.
> The thing came layered with Doug Gwyn’s (where is he? I invited him) BRL SV on BSD
user environment to silence the critics that it wasn’t SVID compatible. I hadn’t even
realized it until I got a few Mach kerneled machines (notably our NeXT cube) and found
that it had my version of the Bourne shell with job control and command line editing
hacked in (to battle the tcsh guys at BRL because I detested the csh syntax and Korn’s
shell hadn’t gotten out of the labs yet at that point).