Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!pawl!shadow From: shadow@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Minix, Unix on the Amiga, and flames - I'll have a light? Message-ID:Date: 15 Aug 89 12:22:59 GMT References: <1225.AA1225@pulsar> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY Lines: 199 In-reply-to: gmd@pulsar.UUCP's message of 14 Aug 89 04:16:00 GMT On 14 Aug 89 04:16:00 GMT, gmd@pulsar.UUCP (George MacDonald) said: George> On 13 Aug, (Deven T. Corzine) uttered forth the following wisdom: Deven> You're a bit late responding. I thought this thread was dead. George> Some of us are busy working all week and don't get much time George> to wade through to torrents of idle chit chat in George> comp.sys.amiga until the weekend. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I *hoped* this thread was dead. It started with flames, so of course the responses were mostly in kind. Enough, already. Deven> Not always so reliable. Maybe you've been lucky. George> My point is that those tools are reliable to the extent that I George> have used them(a reasonable amount). This is INFORMATION which George> is USEFUL to others who read comp.sys.amiga and not George> unsubstantiated opinions which is of limited value. I was also George> complimenting many of the fine public domain authors who have George> taken the time and trouble to share their efforts with all of George> us. It is true that not all public domain programs for the George> amiga are reliable, but many of them are. We all owe these George> authors a debt of gratitude and it does little good to George> chastise their efforts. There is a lot of excellent PD and shareware stuff out there, and there is a lot of garbage as well. ["hey, wanna try out my superduper new program to strip CR's from the end of lines??? It's great, and it's only $25!! (This is PD, and can't be used for profit.)" etc.] [:-)] George> My comment relates to the broader scope of User Interfaces, [...] George> The case where the CLI/SHELL wins is the trivial history and George> editing case. It is very natural to hit the up arrow to go George> back through ones history. Ignoring the fact the the CLI supports nothing of the sort, that sort of history editing I find useful primarily to correct typographical errors and redo a command. To take full advantage of the history mechanism, you need more control, which csh's '!' history substitutions give you. History editing can't take its place. George> "!!, !-1, -, Ctrl P ...", just are not natural at least George> not for me. Depends entirely on what you're used to. George> Another area of great inconsistency with unix is the command George> arguments. The amiga commands are more consistent although George> just as cryptic. The AmigaDOS are *less* consistent, not to mention more verbose. The AmigaDOS style of handling command arguments is slightly quicker to pick up and understand, but no easier to extrapolate, as they aren't very consistent. Deven> That's not the point. The point was that the AmigaDOS _CLI_ Deven> was poor, along with the command names and syntax. The fact Deven> that there's csh clones (somewhat limited when compared to the Deven> real C-Shell, but far far superior to the AmigaDOS CLI) doesn't Deven> change my opinion that the AmigaDOS UI sucks. George> It's the gravity of your opinion that get's me, your George> definition "if it's not a unix shell it doesn't amass to much" George> seems quite eccentric. The stock AmigaDOS (text) UI is the CLI. (forget about workbench; that's an entirely different issue.) And the CLI is pretty user and programmer hostile. Unix is only user hostile. (not that it needs to be, really.) George> I dropped the csh in favor of ksh over six years ago, guess George> who can't wait for Sys Vr4. SysV.4 should be decent, though a bit bloated. Better than SysV.3, at least. George> I understand that obscenity is no more required to emphasize a George> point than is violence. The USENET protocol is well defined George> and abusing it does little good. Ah, but what do you expect when you've been up too long and post? A lack of judgement precludes using that missing judgement to delay posting... Deven> A Unix-like system on the Amiga could well be written to fix Deven> the filesystem far better than AmigaDOS does, as well. George> The old V7 file system is much more susceptible to errors than George> AmigaDOS. Of course one could use the newer Berkeley file George> system, but that is more complicated than AmigaDOS. Who says you have to use either model? I define Unix-like by the programming interface, primarily. And, to a degree, the utilities. The filesystem could be any of many types. Deven> I stated that there are advantages and drawbacks. Whether they Deven> are good design decisions or not is context-dependent. George> Did the designers achieve the goals they set out too? No. They didn't have time to finish the in-house dos, so they had someone port TRIPOS and AmigaDOS was born. (which was not the goal, originally.) George> About memory protection, Deven> No, when you need protection from YOURSELF. George> I don't, DO YOU! *I* write clean code. MANY others don't. Deven> If a process crashes, on the Amiga, it can trash all sorts of Deven> stuff before the system catches it and brings down the machine Deven> along with everything else running. A memory-protected system Deven> will continue running happily. Memory protection is not an Deven> outgrowth of paranoia. George> RIGHT!! HA HA HA HA. I have written several programs that George> manage to crash various flavors of unix. It's not so George> difficult, just push the limits of the system for a while and George> you will break all sorts of stuff in unix. I'll grant you it George> is a lot more difficult than crashing an amiga. On the other George> hand, once a program is debugged on the amiga it run's just as George> well as on a unix system. main(){while(1)fork;} The point was that with memory protection, it is much harder to *accidentally* trash the system. Maliciousness is another matter. [re: which program did it] If you install lots of new, unknown stuff at once, (which I have found common, and random housekeeping intervals) it's hard to tell at times what is causing strange behavior. (often, it isn't so simple as a GURU.) George> And FFS is not THAT different than the original file system. Deven> Yes, FFS *is* THAT different from the old file system. And the Deven> old file system is what I was referring to. It is an Deven> abomination. George> Ok they took off some extra bytes from the file data blocks George> which were not really required. How does that make it such a George> radical change? The old file system may be a little slow at George> some operations but it is quite reliable. It took three years George> and over four hundred disks before I needed diskdoctor, and George> then it restored all my files intact! Reliable, usually... Unless you take out the disk at the wrong time... it can trash it while *reading* the disk... But the most important difference (well, among them) is the more intelligent layout of directories so you don't fall asleep waiting for a directory to scan. I singled out directory scans, because they are so hideously slow under the Old File System, and such an extremely common operation, from a user perspective... George> Sorry, I guess I got fiesty after wading through so much noise. Noise? But comp.sys.amiga is 80% noise! *sigh* Deven> So you can use your Amiga as a terminal George> You mean Xterminal right? And the answer is yes. And ico runs George> as fast on my amiga as the 4/110 at work. (a nice feature, but completely beside the entire discussion.) Deven> to a Unix machine and get all those wonderful utilities. That Deven> doesn't give you that functionality ON THE AMIGA. George> True I don't have ALL the unix functionality on my amiga under George> amiga OS but as time goes by I get closer all the time. And of George> course there are all the other things the amiga does quite George> nicely. Yes, more pd/shareware stuff comes out to being it closer, but it's haphazard and by no means consistent. But, better than nothing. Deven> Go ahead... make my sandwich. George> Bologna on Rye OK? Deal! Deven -- Deven T. Corzine Internet: deven@rpi.edu, shadow@pawl.rpi.edu Snail: 2214 12th Street, Troy, NY 12180 Phone: (518) 271-0750 Bitnet: deven@rpitsmts, userfxb6@rpitsmts UUCP: uunet!rpi!deven Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.