🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10036@stiatl.UUCP> tom@stiatl.UUCP (Tom Wiencko) writes:
>moore@betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) writes:
>
>>While release 9013 (+ n) might fix some bugs, it can do nothing about
>>design flaws (they call them "enhancements"), and there are lots of them.
>
>>IBM has yet to understand that they don't understand.
>
>>AIX v3 is NOT UNIX.  Ask anyone who has managed to use it for more
>>than an hour.  I've only spent a few hours trying to port various
>>pieces of software to this box, but by now I start screaming after
>>trying to use it for more than a few minutes.
>
>>Pray you never actually have to use this system.
>
>That is awfully funny ... I have ported a pretty good bit of code to the
>RS/6000 and the only problems I have had are compiler and library bugs.
>I have yet to run into any design flaws.  None.  Not one.

Some kinds of bugs are evidence of poor coding or accidents.   These
are easily fixed.  Others are evidence of design flaws.  I know that
something is seriously wrong, for example, when I do an "stty erase
^h", change shells, type "stty" again, and find that I have no erase
character...from poking around it a appears that they have several
parallel tty drivers to accomodate BSD/POSIX/SYSV/whatever, but have
done so in such a way as to make a real mess.  I'm sure it will get
"fixed" eventually, but if the implementation were done right in the
first place, these kinds of bugs would never happen.  Or how about the
fact that nearly all of the utilities now have verbose error messages,
even when the old terse message was sufficient?  After seeing a
few *incorrect* verbose error messages, I started to form the opinion
that the effort to change every message in the entire Unix software
suite was misdirected.  Of course they will fix the messages
eventually...all someone has to do is submit a bug report for every
incorrect or misleading message.  Or how about that at sometimes one
of our AIX machines lets you log in as "root" from a telnet 
connection without a password, even though one *has* been assigned
with "passwd root"?  (I'm sure IBM will fix this one soon, and I'm
also sure that we somehow "caused" this problem because we tried to
add a user to the system without understanding how the new security
features of AIX break things that work in traditional UNIX.)

What bothers me most is that all of the above, and nearly every bug
I've seen, is the result of changes that have been made to software
that *already works* as distributed by AT&T, UCB, or whoever...at
least the copies on our source tapes work reasonably well.

I've been using Unix systems for ten years...not as long as many, but
enough to feel at home.  When more than half of the commands I type on
an AIX box don't do what I expect, I start to suspect there's more
than just a few bugs that need fixing...

>Perhaps you can be a little more specific about exactly what it is that
>IBM does not understand.

How about the Unix design philosophy?  How about simplicity and
elegance?  How about "if it works, don't fix it"?

>I do not have to use the system, but I really like it so far.  It also 
>seems more "compatible" (that is, runs more things without messing around)
>than most other flavors of UNIX I have run into.

It's obvious that the AIX v3 developers tried very hard to make the
system "compatible" from both the shell-command level and the
C-callable-function-library level.  But in doing so, they made the
system far more complex than it needs to be, and introduced lots of
failure modes that confuse experienced unix programmers.

>Perhaps you just hate IBM and would like to take it out on this box?

An easy shot, but it misses entirely.  I have an RT (running 4.3) on my
desk, even though I was offered a SparcStation.  I like the RS/6000
hardware -- a far as I can tell, the box is well designed, and a lot
of cycles/second/buck.  But the operating system loses.

The above is entirely my opinion.

-- 
Keith Moore			Internet: moore@cs.utk.edu
University of Tenn. CS Dept.	BITNET: moore@utkvx
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	UT Decnet: utkcs::moore
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822