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>
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Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
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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.