Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 00:43:42 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> Cc: Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What is VT_TFS? Message-ID: <3B95D7AE.22C12A17@mindspring.com> References: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0108311559170.16476-100000@opal> <3B946708.ECB7307B@mindspring.com> <15253.6194.432852.114923@nomad.yogotech.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Nate Williams wrote: > > TRW supported a lot of the early > > 386BSD/FreeBSD effort, back before Walnut Creek CDROM threw > > in and had us change the version number from 0.1 to 1.0 to > > make it a bit easier to sell. > > *Huh* That's revisionist history if I've ever heard it. We > did a 1.0 release for FreeBSD because we wanted to differentiate > ourselves from 386BSD (lot of bad blood there with the Jolitz's) > and NetBSD (which had a 0.8 release at that time). FWIW: This is all archived on Minnie, thanks to Warren Toomey. I believe that Julian was the first corporately employed person, who had at least part of his paid job as working on the 386BSD/FreeBSD code. Bill Jolitz approved a 0.5 "interim release" of 386BSD, as his recent family troubles and recent contract with Sun precluded him getting the promised 1.0 release out any time soon. Some of the people who later split off NetBSD and released the NetBSD 0.8 release had reverse engineered the patchkit format, and built tools to do the same thing. Not understanding the fact that the patchkit was in fact a simple, single user revision control system that I had hacked together, they released patches of their own, starting at #1000. This resulted in problems with serialization, and, I believe, was one of the main factors in their going off on their own. Progress was made on the 386BSD 0.5 release under the auspices of the patchkit maintainers, who had their position of control because I did not distribute the patchkit patch making shell scripts very widely, in order to ensure serialization, so that the patches, when applied, would work, have proper dependency tracking, and not result in conflicts. There was an angry posting on Usenet by Lynne Jolitz; in it, she claimed that 1/3 of the patchkit was good, 1/3 was benign (but unnecessary), and 1/3 was crap. Then she would not say which 1/3 was which; this pissed off more people than the original claim that only 1/3 of the code was any good. After much sniping back and forth, Bill Jolitz posted, and revoked his previous permission to use the 386BSD name (a common law trademark belonging to him), and therefore he had effectively scuttled the interim release under the 386BSD name. Unwilling to throw away many months of work, it was decided to go forward with the release, under the name FreeBSD 0.1. Walnut Creek CDROM suggested that the version number be changed to "1.0", in order to make it an easier sell on CDROM. Check with Warren, if you don't believe this account. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3B95D7AE.22C12A17>