Whats Missing?

[Richard Friedman]

Concerning bld, my understanding is that this product was supplied
in UNICOS to provide something similar to 'build' on the previous
CRAY COS system.  I agree with Jerry, that ranlib is certainly not
a significant feature to worry about.

In fact, there are a number of features of UNICOS that should be
made available on standard BSD UNIX on smaller machines.
One annoying thing I have found on std unix is that the loader won't
let you create an object binary if there are outstanding unsatisfied
externals.  There are times when this is perfectly ok (the code contains
references to library routines that you do not have, and you know that
the running program willnever call them in anycase).  The loader on the
SUN for example wont let you create a runnable program with these
missing routines.  SEGLDR on UNICOS will do the proper thing, which is
to cause calls to unsatified externals to abort the running program.

I was recently at Cray/Mendota installing software on the Cray2 on 5.0
The only problem I ran into is the debugger, cdbx, which has some problems,
altho they are being fixed.  The amazing thing was that I was able to install
a software product that normally runs using X-windows on SUNs and Apollos
on the Cray2 communicating with a SUN over hyperchannel with XTERM with
minimal hassle!  (Code represents over 100K lines of C).  Very impressive!!

-- 
 /s/ rchrd <=> Richard Friedman <=>  rchrd at well
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 (The usual disclaimers apply - I speak only for myself!)