10 Feb
2023
10 Feb
'23
5:48 a.m.
I hesitate to throw this into the mix, but I would observe in those
days, people were a bit less formal about release versions and I have
a suspicion (but only a suspicion) that from time to time what shipped
on a 1200bpi tape was not some canonical 'this is the release as of 3
months ago' but more 'this is a sh scripted product of the checked out
state as I understood it, on the box I had available to me, to cut a
tape.
The tape had to have boot blocks up front. You got told to do mt fsf
stuff. So.. I accept *some* of the tape structure was a bit more
formally policed: giving people the wrong architecture and bootblocks
would be bad.
But when it comes to what was unpacked for runtime? I think it wasn't
quite as 'reproducible build' formal as it is now, for some people.
The version numbers were not mutable. What was stamped with them?
Perhaps it was.
G