Talk:ITS Internals Manual

External docs

I had a crawl though blob/master/files (maybe the wrong place; there seem to be several different ITS filesystems on Github - was one of them a private copy I should not be linking to?), and linked all the useful internals documentation (for future readers, and as a resource for us).

Interestingly, _INFO_ and SYSDOC seem to contain a lot of duplicates, but they weren't symlinked together, as in a number of places there were slight differences, e.g. here and here.

I'm going to take a break, and come back and fill in the outline a little bit more. (I saved what you wrote to 'its-hackers', and added a bit to it; that's the start of one of the sections in the eventual thing.) Jnc (talk) 13:11, 10 September 2023 (CEST)

The "its-vault" repository holds a raw unsorted dump of files that were released from CSAIL archives during an early period of the restoration project. That is why it has many duplicates and several versions of files. From this, a curated selection is put in the main "its" repository. And sometimes bug fixes and updates are made to the "its" files, so they may not be the pristine historical data. If you can see it, it's not private. If you can find it in "its" that's the preferred location, but sometimes older versions are useful and can be linked from the "its-vault" repository. Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 08:44, 11 September 2023 (CEST)

Thanks for explaining that. I'll make sure to prefer the 'its/tree/master/src' branch. (In trying to find it, I got slightly confused by the 'its/tree/master/doc' branch, which appears to contain many of the same directories!)

In trying to clean up places where I had used 'its-vault', I discovered that 'its/tree/master/src' contains program sources, and 'its/tree/master/doc' contains documentation! Makes sense, but initially slightly confusing to those of use who were historically used to having them all thrown in together, especially as directory names are repeated in both! Although I do appreciate not having to look through AI:, MC:, etc to find what I am looking for! Jnc (talk) 06:34, 12 September 2023 (CEST)

That's right. 'doc' also contains PDFs and other documentation. In retrospect the division between ITS in-system source and documentation has not been of great value, but sometimes it's convenient to grep either doc or src for the kind of information you're after. Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 07:24, 12 September 2023 (CEST)

Off to get a nap, and hope my brain refreshes enough to do a good job out the framework. (And I have to reclaim material from Talk:Daemon too.) Jnc (talk) 05:17, 12 September 2023 (CEST)