From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 16:54:09 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200218005409.GD4767@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202002180017.01I0HI0I1415945@darkstar.fourwinds.com>
On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 04:17:18PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Richard Salz writes:
> >
> > > 'The problem is that the ecosystem has been fragmented by people doing
> > their "documentation" in their preferred formats instead of in a common
> > (man) format.
> >
> > Damn those unauthorized developers. How dare they write code that doesn't
> > meet standards.
> >
> > Get off my lawn.
>
> The relevant TUHS part of it that maybe some folks here can speak to is how
> did UNIX remain so cohesive for so long? How were decisions made? Of course,
> this started to fall apart with System III and such as things got more clunky.
I think that part of it was that machines were small, both in memory and in
disk. I did a huge programming project because I wanted to compress the
pathalias output; I had 20 users on a 40MB disk. So big == evil.
The other thing, if we're talking about kernels, uniprocessor kernels
were pretty simple to understand compared to SMP, and NUMA, and the PCI
devices tree and a million other things that modern computers had.
v6 was documented in the lion book, you could read it all and understand
it in maybe a week or two? That's not a thing any more.
> I've probably said this before, but today I see way too much "string theory
> programming". What I mean by that is the "I have an idea so I'll just start
> my own universe that doesn't play well with others rather than extending the
> existing ecosystem" model. That's my beef with texinfo; there was already
> an existing functional system and rather than making some improvements a new
> incompatible universe was created.
Yeah, you need a dictator that says that's not OK.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-02-18 0:54 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 83+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-02-17 15:20 Doug McIlroy
2020-02-17 16:47 ` Clem Cole
2020-02-17 18:09 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-17 18:39 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-02-17 21:16 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-17 22:50 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-17 23:22 ` Warner Losh
2020-02-18 0:56 ` Bakul Shah
2020-02-18 3:33 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-02-18 7:27 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-18 0:03 ` Richard Salz
2020-02-18 0:17 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-02-18 0:54 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2020-02-18 1:05 ` Bakul Shah
2020-02-18 7:40 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-02-18 7:45 ` arnold
2020-02-18 20:24 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-02-18 11:22 ` Rich Morin
2020-02-18 12:28 ` arnold
2020-02-18 12:49 ` U'll Be King of the Stars
2020-02-18 13:23 ` arnold
2020-02-18 15:11 ` Clem Cole
2020-02-18 15:28 ` arnold
2020-02-18 15:36 ` Larry McVoy
2020-02-18 15:43 ` Steve Nickolas
2020-02-18 15:52 ` Clem Cole
2020-02-18 16:40 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-02-18 18:39 ` Steve Nickolas
2020-02-18 21:26 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-02-18 21:29 ` Wesley Parish
2020-02-19 4:52 ` [TUHS] Open source or free software? (was: man Macro Package and pdfmark) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-02-18 15:48 ` [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark Clem Cole
2020-02-18 16:02 ` Chet Ramey
2020-02-18 16:28 ` Clem Cole
2020-02-18 17:49 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-18 21:46 ` Rich Morin
2020-02-18 16:47 ` Henry Bent
2020-02-18 20:22 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-02-19 4:44 ` Larry McVoy
2020-02-19 18:01 ` Earl Baugh
2020-02-19 18:12 ` Emile Bye
2020-02-19 20:18 ` Michael Huff
2020-02-19 20:34 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-02-19 21:09 ` Henry Bent
2020-02-20 7:27 ` arnold
2020-02-20 7:43 ` Rich Morin
2020-02-20 13:15 ` Dan Cross
2020-02-20 16:23 ` Larry McVoy
2020-02-20 16:34 ` Arthur Krewat
2020-02-20 17:06 ` Al Kossow
2020-02-20 17:24 ` Bakul Shah
2020-02-20 17:48 ` Rich Morin
2020-02-20 20:10 ` Bakul Shah
2020-02-20 20:18 ` Rich Morin
2020-02-20 16:48 ` Nemo
2020-02-20 17:00 ` Larry McVoy
2020-02-20 19:16 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-02-20 23:45 ` Doug McIntyre
2020-02-21 0:18 ` Warner Losh
2020-02-21 1:14 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-02-21 8:19 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-21 8:17 ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-02-21 10:17 ` arnold
2020-02-21 10:37 ` Ed Bradford
2020-02-21 18:34 ` Heinz Lycklama
2020-02-21 18:59 ` Warner Losh
2020-02-21 21:10 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-02-21 21:46 ` David Barto
2020-02-22 6:48 ` Ed Bradford
2020-02-22 10:42 ` Al Kossow
2020-02-22 11:01 ` Ed Bradford
2020-02-22 16:38 ` Warner Losh
2020-02-22 18:11 ` arnold
2020-02-22 23:41 ` [TUHS] Mini-UNIX Warren Toomey
2020-02-22 11:08 ` [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark Ed Bradford
2020-02-22 16:40 ` Warner Losh
2020-02-22 16:46 ` Clem Cole
2020-02-22 17:51 ` Heinz Lycklama
2020-02-17 18:55 Noel Chiappa
2020-02-17 20:13 ` Clem Cole
2020-02-17 21:06 ` CHARLES KESTER
2020-02-18 0:36 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-02-18 13:13 Don Hopkins
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