🚀 go-pugleaf

brunner@joyce (Thomas Eric Brunner) writes:
>I'd like to know what other users of the rt as a 4.3 platform have
>collected in the way of unfixed bugs or undesirable features, as well
>as their experience with IBM's support for the current release.

Scott Schwartz <schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu> replies:
>My impression, as a grad student who is not in any way speaking for
>the department, is that the (unix) programmers at IBM Palo Alto are
>doing a pretty good job, but that somebody higher up couldn't care
>less about offering 4.3BSD as a (viable) product and is seeing to it
>that anyone who tries to get it and make it work is given a hard time.
>This might be totally off base, in which case I apologise for doubting
>such a fine company as IBM, but it sure seems that way to me.

My impression is that IBM would really like to support only one UNIX
for RTs, and that they have a difficult time understanding why lots
of us prefer 4.3 to AIX.  The fact that they support 4.3 at all is to
their credit, when some other manufacturers seem to be moving away from
4.3.

>Three general problems: (1) The 6152's malfunction at will; if they
>have to deal with an ethernet, for example.  (2) X11R3 doesn't work on
>any flavor of RT.  (3) The C compilers IBM ships generate bad code.

(1) I can't speak for 6152's.  We don't have any here.
(2) X11R3 works fine for me on a 6150 and a 6151.  It did require a few
    patches.  This is with the December 1988 release of 4.3, but I had
    a reasonable server working with a much earlier release.  
(3) The latest release of 4.3 from IBM contains 3 (!) C compilers, all
    of which are somehow fundamentally brain-damaged.  Fortunately, for
    any piece of software I have found, at least one of them seems to 
    work.  I'd much rather have a single C compiler that can be trusted
    to work properly.  (Why hasn't someone ported the AIX C compiler to
    4.3?  Surely it wouldn't be hard to change the codegen for the 4.3
    function calling convention; what else would be required?  Of course,
    then there would be 4 C compilers...)
    
>To a first approximation, this is just not acceptable, especially
>considering that the competition seems able to get all these things to
>work.

My feeling about the RT 4.3 is that despite the above limitations, it is the
least brain-damaged UNIX derivative we have here at UT.  That doesn't mean
that it's the best-maintained or most up-to-date, but the serious bugs seem
to get fixed between releases.  I wish I could say the same for SunOS.

>This is not just grousing because we don't want something new.  It
>means that we can seamlessly interoperate with a diverse set of
>platforms.  It also means that the thousands of man years that have
>been put into the development of BSD unix are available to us.

I agree; this is a major win.  I've tried several SysV-ish boxes with 
"BSD emulation", and the porting effort for non-trivial applications is
always several times that of porting an application from one BSD to 
another.  One of the best things about 4.3 is that it's very compatible
with vanilla BSD, not only at the C source code but also at the shell
script level...all of the commands are there.

--
Keith Moore
UT Computer Science Dept.	Internet/CSnet: moore@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	BITNET: moore@utkvx
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822