*BSD News Article 8201


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From: jkh@whisker.lotus.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Shared Libraries for 386BSD (long, w/source)
Message-ID: <JKH.92Nov27180432@whisker.lotus.ie>
Date: 27 Nov 92 18:04:32 GMT
References: <lohse.722861707@tech7> <JKH.92Nov27145531@whisker.lotus.ie>
	<veit.722878428@du9ds3>
Sender: usenet@ieunet.ie (USENET News System)
Organization: Lotus Development Ireland
Lines: 37
In-Reply-To: veit@du9ds3's message of 27 Nov 92 15: 33:48 GMT
Nntp-Posting-Host: whisker.lotus.ie

You make some good points.

On the subject of cooperative efforts, I assume you also saw (and to
some extent were responding to) the pccons driver recently posted?  I
mailed the author and thanked him for his work, but explained that I
was already committed to your driver and didn't want to switch drivers
a 3rd time.  I also wondered at how he had managed to develop such a
driver in isolation, without seeing your previous work.  Perhaps a
more informal mailing list arm of the ref.tfs.com working groups needs
to be set up to deal with people more on the "fringes" of the
development community.

We need to remember that not everyone has USENET or INTERNET
connectivity and I think in some cases the message just isn't getting
through.

As to the pccons driver, it would be nice to see some of the features
of his driver incorporated into yours - specifically the virtual terminal
handling.

For the record, I don't think that going for a 'full-featured' UNIX
operating system as one of 386BSD's goals is necessarily that bad of
an idea, either.  Don't forget that for many people, UNIX is merely
the means to an end (I.E.  a platform on which one can develop actual
research APPLICATIONS).  Just because some of us enjoy hacking on the
kernel doesn't mean that 386BSD has to forever remain a playground for
our interests only.  I suspect that, at some point the the distant
future, you'll see a 'stable' 386BSD thread and a 'research' one, much
like what's currently being done for gcc.  I, for one, would heartily
endorse such a thing.

There does come a time when one wants to stop playing with the kernel
and get down to writing user-level code on a platform that doesn't
necessarily crash every day.


					Jordan