Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: System V Release 4.0 Developer Conferences Message-ID: <1988Sep26.213223.407@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <167@hsi86.hsi.UUCP> <1988Sep22.173745.14647@utzoo.uucp> <8570@smoke.ARPA> Date: Mon, 26 Sep 88 21:32:23 GMT In article <8570@smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB)) writes: >>A friend who attended said it was horrifying, actually... > >Come on, Henry, how about some INFORMATION. Herewith roughly what my friend told me. Note, this is him talking (more or less, I did the typing based on my notes from a phone call to him -- he's hard to reach by mail), not me. I take no responsibility for errors! :-) --------- The biggest problem is "filling in the gap rather than narrowing it". "Why do you want both NFS and RFS?" Many people saw this as pointless duplication of effort, leading to unnecessary complexity and all the problems that brings. Details on licensing were scarce. Worse, direct questions on the subject were evaded rather than answered. There is no agreement between AT&T and Sun to avoid divergence of the two systems *after* SVR4. This horrified everyone. "Then what's the point of all this?!?" The kernels will be very big, probably needing a 16MB machine just to get started. Nobody liked the sound of that. Administration will be a nightmare, especially with two different network filesystems and all the permission complications that implies. What are the semantics and implications of symbolic links in such an environment? Training people to use and administer such a complex system will be lengthy and difficult. There was inadequate detail on the commands that will be part of the standard environment. ABI implies that a conforming machine must have kernel support for both NeWS *and* X. This is ridiculous for people who plan to run neither. The over-friendly system-administration interface isolates even the knowledgeable administrator from what is really happening underneath. This is fine IF IT WORKS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. People with experience with things like 3Bs know damn well that it doesn't, at least not as normally supplied by AT&T. And when it doesn't work, you're up the creek, since the internals are not documented. Troubleshooting one's own problems is impossible. In general, overall, the system is not getting simpler or cleaner. Quite the contrary: it is getting bloated, complex, and slow. It will be difficult and expensive to run, support, and learn. As for the presentation, it was good but not great. The level of detail was inconsistent and often ridiculously low for software developers. "Two hours one morning when we learned nothing whatsoever." "Much more technical content could have been provided in the same length of time." People did *not* like the way some questions, e.g. licensing, were evaded rather than answered; even an honest "I don't know" (which is what the real software people normally said in that situation) is better. --------- -- NASA is into artificial | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology stupidity. - Jerry Pournelle | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu