7 Sep
2022
7 Sep
'22
8:56 p.m.
I've never heard the claim that the kernel was "defect free", as a
fisherman that sort of feels like saying "I always get fish" which is
a sure fire way to make sure you get none on the next trip :-)
I do get "Deliberately wrote consistent, high quality code." as that is
a choice. If you look through the code my team wrote, I think you'll
find the same. But everyone has to be committed to that level of
coding or it goes to shit pretty quickly. Super pleasant when the
whole team wants the code to be like that.
I'd be willing to say that you could find a bug very quickly in our
code but to claim that it is bug free is a bridge too far for me.
On Wed, Sep 07, 2022 at 11:40:04AM +1000, steve jenkin wrote:
Doug, Larry et al,
Thanks very much for the history - unaware of those stories/ facts.
I???ve scanned the 1989 Miller et al paper, will read properly soon.
The legacy of that paper is the extensive automatic testing now commonplace in large Open
Software projects.
I wasn't clear in what I wrote. Have been immersed in early papers of teaching the
kernel at UNSW :(
Reminds on this list precise terms matter: that ???Unix??? / UNIX (tm) and "the
kernel" (+ version) are very different.
I meant the V5 / V6 kernel was ???known defect free', hadn???t thought of Userland /
utilities & libraries :(
From what I???ve read: distribution tapes, pre-USG, were created from the current copy of
???the system??? - not sure which machine that was, presumably one controlled by Ken.
Is that a reasonable statement, the kernel, pre-USG, had zero (known) Technical Debt when
shipped?
I???ve read that Ken wrote the kernel with an eye to it being a coding exemplar.
Deliberately wrote consistent, high quality code.
Is that another mis-interpretation of mine?
regards
steve j
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
On 7 Sep 2022, at 01:07, Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin (Research) Unix ... 'shipped' with zero
known bugs.
It wasn't a Utopia. Right from the start man pages reported BUGS,
though many were infelicities, not implementation errors.