🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BzGL07.2wK@dscomsa.desy.de> Hallam@zeus02.desy.de writes:
>In article <1992Dec14.191335.2834@lsl.co.uk>, snail@lsl.co.uk writes:
>
>|>In article <jdd.724022716@cdf.toronto.edu>, jdd@cdf.toronto.edu (John DiMarco)
>|>writes:
>
>|>> My basic point is this: A system's "openness" is a measure of its 
>|>> replaceability by a system from another vendor. By this standard, VAX/VMS
>|>is
>|>> not very open, and random-workstation/UNIX-variant is more but not
>|>completely
>|>> open.
>|>
>|>I'll go along with that.
>
>
>Complete codswallop. By this definition the most "open" system is a house brick.
>It is trivial to port any application that runs on a house brick to any other
>system.
>
>Functionality also comes into it. If people write programs that require high
>levels of functionality from an O/S then they are going to be less portable.
>Does this mean that the O/S should as a result be regarded as being better if it
>provides less features?
>
>Consider any application written for a line mode terminal using FORTRAN I/O. The
>portability of these programs was pretty much setttled a long time ago. On the
>other hand any code using a windows system soon becomes a porting hazard. On
>UNIX there are even difficulties in porting code from one UNIX system to another
>of the model and from the same vendor. This is because sysops tend to want to
>split up large libraries amongst disks and UNIX does not provide a mechanism
>like logical names which allow a user to virtualize a disk system to make it
>look like something else. Logical links don't count in this regard, they affect
>the system environment.
>

I don't understand the "logical links don't count"......  we use 'em for
exactly this purpose.  When Sun puts something somewhere that we don't
like (don't have room in that partition, etc.) we move that "thing" and
symbolic link to it.  We've never had any problems with X, openwin, etc.
in this environment.....

>
>UNIX is a single user system too. The only evidence of a multiuser capability is
>

This is news to us.  We have been using unix boxes for multiple users for 15
years.  Unix is as multi-user as any O/S I have used.  (this includes running
X over async modem lines if you want....)  We have students doing program
development, email, compiling, remote machine access, distributed processing
using domain sockets and/or RPC's, etc.


-- 
!Robert Hyatt                    Computer and Information Sciences   !
!hyatt@cis.uab.edu               University of Alabama at Birmingham !