Hard coded limits (was Re: LINK COUNT TABLE OVERFLOW)

[Heikki Suonsivu]

In article <1296 at tuewsd.win.tue.nl> wsinpdb at lso.win.tue.nl (Paul de Bra) writes:
>bug, but for adding their own "new and improved" features.

Most often I have missed the source to fix ridiculous bugs in the operating
system. Like vendor compiling lint with symbol table of 1024, so that you
can't lint any programs big enough to really need lint.

>Look what happened to Unix. The source was given to universities,

If it would not have been given to universities, we would probably get
subsecond sleep by year 2000. Or sensibly working signals by year 2005. Or
disappearing inodes bug fixed by 1995, and better file system by year 2000.

True, it would have been better if only one institution worked on unix, but
I would rather see universities working on it than AT&T. Berkeleyisms
aren't always the best, but at least they are there.

>versions of Unix System V release 3.2... different file systems,

There would be no pressure to fix the file system if it would at least do
small things correctly (like keeping the free list sorted, and allowing
more than 14 character file names). 

>is just too tempting, and one really should not do this.

I'm eagerly waiting MACH non-at&t-licence kernel stuff come out, so I can
join messing things up :-)