Curation of OS/8 sources

[William Cattey]

Although I've been doing it under the PiDP-8/i development tree hosted at tangentsoft, I've been doing a fair bit of spelunking into the patch history of OS/8.

I've taken OS/8 v3d as my baseline.

I've looked at a set of sources found on the net labeled as os8v3f.

I've also glanced at OS/78 and OS/278 sources as preserved at ibiblio.org.

Support for RL01 and the KT8a memory expansion (which takes you up to 128K words maximum memory in a PDP-8a) comes with the "OS/8 V3D Device Extension Kit". This is not to be confused with the "OS/8 Extension Kit V3D" which gives you BASIC and TECO.

A "final" release of OS/8 was made called the "OS/8 V3D Combined Kit". Page 15 of the PDP-8 Digital Software News (DEC AA-J235A-BA) gives 5 products:

1 - OS/8 V3D
2 - OS/8 Extension Kit V3D
3 - OS/8 V3D Device Extensions
4 - 0S/8 FORTRAN IV V3D
5 - OS/8 V3D Combined Kit

It goes on to say that the Combined Kit is the merge of the first 4 with all patches up to and including May 1979 installed.

So far I've not found distribution media of the Combined Kit anywhere. I'm trying to synthesize it from what I have found between ibilo.com, vandermark.ch and other sources.

There is a niggly little source level mistake that I WANT to fix on a source level:

BUILD in the Combined Kit and in the Device Extensions Kit is version 7A, but the code left the version at 6A, even when that code was used in OS/278. No patch was ever issues.

Now we get to my question about curation of OS/8 sources:

Stuff that I build out of v3f to get to the Combined kit SHOULD set version 7A because it's a significant user-visible difference (6A does not run under BATCH. 7A does.)

But then what I produce will not be an accurate, bug for bug compatible version of the Combined Kit.

What opinions do people have about what the "proper" curation should be?

[cjl]

As you know, I want the best for each program, and a list of what was fixed to get there, etc.

cjl