On Oct 4, 2021, at 10:51 AM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 at 13:42, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

On 10/4/21 12:22 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
> My question is: how was this sort of thing done in the real world?  If
> I was a site running stock 4.3BSD, would I have received (or been able
> to request) updated tapes at regular intervals?  The replacement
> process that I have been using is fairly labor intensive and on a real
> VAX would have been very time intensive too.  Fortunately two to three
> years' worth of changes were not so drastic that I ever found myself
> in a position where the existing tools were not able to compile pieces
> of Tahoe that I needed to proceed, but I could easily imagine finding
> myself in such a place.  (This was, by the way, what I ran into when
> attempting to upgrade from 2.9BSD to 2.10BSD, despite a fully
> documented contemporary upgrade procedure).

Hi Henry,

I expect folks who actually ran this can weigh in with the 'real world'
perspective. What I can offer is that the document entitled, "Installing
and Operating 4.3BSD-tahoe UNIX* on the VAX" by the folks doing the
release (CSRG) is probably canonical:

http://blog.livedoor.jp/suzanhud/BSD/4.3BSD_Tahoe_VAX.pdf

Well now I feel a little silly.  I did look in the source tree for a document like this but couldn't find one.  It does appear, however, in the installed (for Tahoe) tree in /usr/doc/smm/01.setup.

-Henry