Hi Scott, Scott Stanley wrote on Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 05:20:05PM -0700: > Somebody wrote:
>> OpenBSD specifically and old BSD in general is not true to Unix. From >> ksh to billions of options to find and other tools to the entire >> networking framework (bolted on with additional syscalls, pseudo devices >> etc), nothing of that is Unix (or even -like). >> >> Here is something to read: http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ > Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting read. > > I have this dopey idea it would be fun to "restore" some of these > programs on my system, You mean, remove options that were added later than AT&T UNIX v7? http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/ brings you a bit closer for some tools. http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl has all the original code. > mostly as a way to learn C, Coding yourself may help, reading code may help too, but reading modern code is usually more profitable than reading very old code. Good candidates for reading are medium-sized, very active projects like OpenSSH or tmux. > and also because I > always get hung up on these little philosophical things rather than > the real-world implications. There probably is no practical value to > doing it other than the educational factor, but I don't really want to > break my system in the process. > > That last part makes me wonder if there's a reason why OpenBSD devs > didn't do this. What exactly? Removing useless options? On the one hand, that's often impossible because existing code, existing scripts depend on it. That's why adding useless knobs is so bad: You add them, people start using them, and if you wait too long, you can't rip them out any more. Sure, it would be nice to rip that "unsigned" abomination out of C. But who is goint to rewrite the world afterwards? On the other hand, we do remove things when we get a chance. Compare the number of tools and options in the groff-1.21p3 package and in mandoc(1), for example. > I'm inclined to think it's because other things are > more important to them in a world of finite time/manpower. No, you will find few other projects where people a so fond of removing useless stuff like round here. > If that's > the reason, I may just plod ahead and give it a go, but if there's a > functional reason, I'd like to know and would appreciate any insight. For removing stuff, you need to know very precisely how it is used, so that's not a simple task. You need experienced people like tedu@ for doing that. ;-) Yours, Ingo
