From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2017 11:17:28 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] UNIX of choice these days?
Message-ID: <1506784652.28254.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>

Warner Losh:

  It's an abundance of caution thing. This code had security problems in the
  past, we're not 100% sure that we've killed all the issues, though we
  believe we have.

====

And if there isn't anyone who's actively interested in the
code, willing to dig in to clean it up and make security
issues less likely, deal with multiprocessing matters, and
so on, that's a perfectly reasonable stance.

I think it's an unfortunate result, and I wonder how much
of it comes from a cultural view that sysctl >> /proc.
(Recall how Ken and Dennis originally resisted Doug's push
for pipelines and filters, because--as Dennis once put it
in a talk--it just wasn't the way programs worked?)

But as someone who is sometimes credited with removing
more code than he wrote while working on the latter-day
Research kernel, it's hard for me to argue with the principle.
A lot of the code I tossed out was complicated stuff that
was barely used if used at all, and that nobody was willing
to step up to volunteer to maintain.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON