Is A/UX viable? Your advice sought

[Thad P Floryan]

A recent posting by petechen at porthos.rutgers.edu (Peter Chen) ends with:

	Oh, I almost forgot about "bash." In case, you haven't heard of it,
	it's a superset of Bourn shell.  I want to compile it for A/UX since
	it has the file completion feature which none of the shell included
	under A/UX does.

The A/UX 1.0 ksh, in emacs mode, performs file completion just fine (using
two ESCapes).  Has something gotten "broken" in later A/UX releases, or is
it just poor documentation?

Frankly, I'm quite disappointed with the docs accompanying A/UX, both the
online "man" pages and the printed manual set.

For example, I needed to add more HD capacity to one of my company's Mac II
A/UX systems which sported the internal 80MB and an external 20SC drive.
"Simple," says I, "let's just replace the 20MB drive with a Quantum 80S (or
similar) and the problem will be solved." So I shoe-horned a Miniscribe 130MB
SCSI drive into the 20SC's case and proceeded to format; you don't want to
know what I did with the Seagate 20MB drive!  :-)

The docs for diskformat give a nice example ("diskformat /dev/rdsk/c8d0s0 ..."
for floppy) which I adapted for the HD per "diskformat /dev/rdsk/c4d0s0 ..."
with no luck.  Only in some OTHER obscure document did I find an oblique
reference to "slice 31" referencing the entire disk; finally got it formatted
("diskformat /dev/rdsk/c4d0s31 ...") and a brief sesssion with "dp" allowed
the drive to be mounted and all's working fine now. 

Wonderful; my first 4 hours with A/UX is spent doing something that should
have taken only 15-20 minutes.  :-(

Now, this was with A/UX 1.0.  Yeah, don't laugh. The 2.0 upgrades have been
ordered and are expected momentarily.  I have just "inherited" the task of
porting my company's product to UNIX after the other team got nowhere's after
18 months.  So, after adding another 4MB RAM to the systems and more HDs, I
should be all set, right?  Or so I thought ...

First, some background.  I run the Silicon Valley AT&T UNIX Users' Group which
meets at the AT&T West Coast Training Center (see the blurbs in the San Jose
Mercury News, MICROTIMES, COMPUTER CURRENTS, and COMPUTER SHOPPER), so I'm
not exactly a neophyte when it comes to UNIX.  I operate my own systems
comprising several 3B1, Motorola 6350, etc. over Ethernet, StarLAN, and "other"
nets, and I regularly use HP-UX, UTS (Amdahl's SysV variant), several AT&T
SysV versions, and other variations.  I've literally ported thousands of
programs between these platforms with NO trouble.  Note the platforms:

	680x0: 3B1, HP-UX, Motorola 6350, AT&T, etc
	80x86: AT&T, UNISYS
	7300:  UTS (Amdahl)
	risc:  HP-UX

>From a compressed EMACS tar file on, say, the 3B1, it takes but 55 minutes to
uncompress the 4.5MB (to 12.3MB), unpack the tar, start a make, and end up
with a new EMACS.  Note the 3B1 is but a 10MHz 68010, VM demand-paged system
using ST506 disks (albeit large ones (Maxtor XT2190)).  Took only 35 minutes
on an HP9000-855.

>From a compressed GNU cc tar file also on the 3B1, it takes but 3 hours to
uncompress, unpack, run thru all the makes to the third level and end up with
a new version of gcc.

Now, I've only started reading this newsgroup 2 weeks ago, but I'm left with
the distinct impression that porting software to A/UX is a royal pain, and
that it's a MAJOR effort to bring up applications which convert just fine on
what "should be" compatible architectures (e.g. other 680x0 systems).

In other words, what's so different about A/UX that it makes porting gcc and
EMACS (and many other programs, per the postings I'm reading here) so darned
difficult?  Isn't A/UX (all versions) at least based on SVR2?

Since I'm also a compiler writer (among other things), I'm quite familiar with
hardware architecture (nearly 3 decades in this racket :-) and I fail to see
what should be so different (in, say, gcc) for a 68010 3B1, a 68020/030 Mac II,
a 68030 HP9000-350, etc?   Is it that the A/UX libraries differ so much from
other UNIX systems?

OK, I'm not a masochist and I want to get this project going quickly, so I just
ftp'd all the GNU stuff (gas 1.36 and gcc 1.37) from apple.com and we installed
them today (Monday) on our Mac II A/UX systems, and preliminary tests indicate
they (gcc and gas) function.

Now I'm faced with porting the 12MB of (uncompressed) source comprising my
company's product and I'm starting to have some doubts about A/UX being a
reasonable port platform based on other peoples' problems as reported and
posted here.  I don't want to get 2 months into this project and discover
there's not a snowball's chance in Hades getting it to work.

Some of my concerns include:

1. can "ld" be expected to link a 700Kbyte executable comprising 400 object
   files compiled using gcc and gas without dumping core?

   That size (700KByte) is based on the executable's size of the same product
   on a VAX.  Speaking of which, Apple itself is already using my product on
   their inhouse VAXes for some interesting applications as reported in mags
   such as COMPUTERWORLD.

2. what "breaks" so many programs between the several different versions of
   A/UX?  Will A/UX 2.0's shared libraries (finally) stabilize the diffs?

3. has A/UX passed any version of SVVS (System V Validation Suite)?  If so,
   which?  (And WHICH version(s) of A/UX :-)

4. what kind of support and bug-fix turnaround can be expected from Apple?
   Yes, my company and I are official developers in APDA, but recent phone
   conversations with APDA have resulted in run-arounds and refusal to even
   divulge phone numbers of technical contact personnel; the response was to
   write, yes, write (not call) the "Software Evangelists" to plead our case.
   Sheesh.

5. is Apple committed to UNIX (aka A/UX), or is(was) A/UX only a marketing
   ploy for satisfying government procurement of Macs?

I'm making NO apologies if any of the above offends anyone; these ARE issues
of concern to me personally and, as people who've read my postings on USENET
over the years already know, I speak with candor.

I sincerely want to bring up the product under A/UX as soon as possible using
the Mac II A/UX systems already inhouse, but if the collective net wisdom
suggests this may be folly, I have no compunction calling HP or UNISYS or
others and getting their development systems instead.

Your advice is sought.  I'd prefer public discussion, but email is fine, too.

Thad

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]