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Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen Hayes modems hooked up to a Li

by js2 4y ago

Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen Hayes modems hooked up to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. And two PCs (named "hops" and "barley") running Slackware. That was my first experience with Linux. It was a barbaric OS compared to the Unix workstations we had in the CS department running HP/UX and SunOS. But it had promise... I think my first open source contribution was while working there (I added the "-e" switch to chpasswd) and it's still part of Linux today. Let's see... found it: https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L1780 https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L178...

icedchai 4y ago
SunOS was also pretty bare bones, if I remember correctly. CS departments had to install a ton of 3rd party software to give you a usable system.
- js2 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to setup a software depot: https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=821346 https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_linux/software_collections/local_depot.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin... The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme. Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now. Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time. Software packaging... fun times.

by js2 4y ago

icedchai 4y ago

SunOS was also pretty bare bones, if I remember correctly. CS departments had to install a ton of 3rd party software to give you a usable system.

js2 4y ago
Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to setup a software depot: https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=821346 https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_linux/software_collections/local_depot.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin... The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme. Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now. Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time. Software packaging... fun times.