[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: project athena (was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS)

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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[[ sorry for replying to myself ]]

One or two tweaks...

On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 11:44 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:20 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:44 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:34 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> If I recall correctly (and it's been a while...) csup, CVSup, et al
>> >> were based on `sup`, which was a file distribution tool somewhat like
>> >> `rdist`, which came from CMU. csup/cvsup was optimized for moving
>> >> source code deltas (a la CVS repositories) around. I recall a
>> >> graphical client written in Modula-3?
>> >
>> > Right -- ??maybe?? Bob Baron or one of the Mach guys did it  - used the
>> DEC Modula-3 IIRC.
>>
>> That sounds right for `sup`. I vaguely remember it being associated
>> with Coda, as well? I believe the BSDs used it to distribute source
>> code (in addition to or instead of anoncvs?) in the 90s.
>>
>
> The original sup was on the 4.4BSD tapes, and was written in C' It may
> have come from Mach.
>
>
>> It looks like CVSup was done by John Polstra in Modula-3. It was being
>> used for FreeBSD in at least 1996, but I don't know when they started
>> using it. It's mostly disappeared, but archive.org has a snapshot of
>> its old web site:
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20060103034312/http://www.cvsup.org/faq.html
>>
>
> Yes. FreeBSD didn't offer anoncvs because CVS was so terrible at handling
> the
> high rate of change for the FreeBSD project. I don't think any of the other
> BSD projects ever used it officially, but I have a vague memory of there
> being
> unofficial NetBSD and OpenBSD mirrors. The latter two projects focused on
> using anoncvs, to the present day (though both now have git and other
> mirrors).
> DragonFlyBSD used it briefly since it started with CVS and then
> transitioned to
> git, when it stopped using it entirely.
>

anoncvs didn't cache the state, but cvsupd did, so with the high number of
clients
FreeBSD had, cvsupd could handle the load, while anoncvs made the machine
fall
over a lot due to all the file I/O and some, long since fixed, bugs in the
new-at-the-time
unified buffer cache code. The data for cvsupd's working set could fit into
memory,
but cvs's scanning of the whole tree blew any caching in the kernel out of
the water
in addition to hitting the above bugs....


> `csup` was a reimplementation in C (without the GUI part, I imagine)
>> because the Modula-3 dependency was a pain.
>>
>
> Yes. The compilers were slow to update, the old ones stopped working
> due to the compilers heavy knowledge of threads, which were undergoing
> flux in the base FreeBSD system, so updates were always tricky. Plus
> there were issues with different upstreams accepting FreeBSD patches
> for various reasons that I have only a vague recollection of. There were
> two
> or three compilers, IIRC: The original DEC one, then an egcs based one
> and then a gcc one when egcs and gcc "reunited"... This was an unbelievable
> pain, with few people knowing how to properly do a bringup and John
> retiring
> or becoming semi-retired in this time period.
>

cvsup was there for FreeBSD/alpha, but never made the transition to powerpc,
sparc64 or mips because the modula-3 compiler support for those platforms
at the time was terrible to non-existent... And IIRC the transition from
the DEC
compiler to egcs was motivated by trying to fix this problem, but I don't
think it
ever really worked out that way... I also think amd64 was an issue too, but
my recollections on that are fuzzy.

Warner


> Warner
>
>
>> >> The SUPDUP protocol used by ITS hosts was a "Display Protocol" based
>> >> on TELNET: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc734
>> >
>> > Exactly - popular with the LISP hackers.  I started to implement it in
>> the CMU Distributed Front-End years ago but never finished it - I don't
>> know if it was ever completed.
>>
>> Oh yeah, I imagine it was implemented on Lisp machines, probably for
>> connecting to ITS. Lars, do you know?
>>
>>         - Dan C.
>>
>

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