[TUHS] Re: UNIX Release 4 Findings

That's all the more reason to be precise, with all the uncertainty there is at least the fact that I can say this is what the documentarian in charge of the manual had approved to live in /usr/man/u_man on the particular box they had hooked up to the typesetter when they cut the plates that eventually printed the book I hold. No amount of printed material will ever capture reality, but it does give a darn good window into it in a more precise way. On the note of precision, to add fuel to the USG fire, there is also the USG Program Generic line, which has numbers distinct from this stuff too. So many branches... - Matt G. ------- Original Message ------- On Thursday, February 9th, 2023 at 8:48 PM, George Michaelson ggm(a)algebras.org wrote: > 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