MacIDRIS?

[Kent Sandvik]

urlichs at smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) writes in article <90.140.19:17:53 at smurf.sub.org>:
:    In comp.sys.mac.apps, article <1990May11.162553.6946 at gtisqr.uucp>,
:      karl at gtisqr.UUCP (Karl Lunt) writes:

:    UNIX? Sorry, it's IDRIS. They munged, for sake of uniformity, brevity, or
:    compatibility, most of the standard commands.
..hmm, a lot of flame, poor Idris, it's not that bad...

:    - Compatibility means that they're compatible to their other IDRIS products,
:      not to Unix.

Actually POSIX...

:    - Commands means that if you tell their "ed" to print a lines, then it will do
:      so. If that line has a form-feed character in the middle so that the screen
:      gets cleared when printing and you don't have a chance to see what is there,
:      then so be it. (No, no "od" either.)

OK, I'll send this in as a bug report to the developer, thx.
    
:    I began to have serious doubts about this as soon as I got the package, which
:    included _five_ 800k disks. You can't put a serious OS, library code, compiler, and standard utilities onto 4 MB without sacrificing something. Idris
:    sacrifices a lot.

As some of us know Whitesmiths Idris is wellknown to pack down the size
of the UNIX kernel and the utilities to a small binary size... 

:    < 1.  How is the IDRIS executive (and all executing sub-processes)
:    < protected if you leave the IDRIS environment and spend some time running
:    < (for example) MacPaint, then return to IDRIS?
:    < 
:    It isn't. Without a MMU, you can't. It's just a Multifinder process among
:    others.

It actually makes use of the PMMU if it exists in the system.  But due
to the nature it is a pure MF proc, and that is the beaty, you could run
it on a Mac Plus or other non-A/UX hardware.  And in the new release you
could cut-paste between apps as well as run cron and uucp jobs in the
background. 
    
:    < 2.  In the above event, what happens to any time-scheduled tasks that
:    < should have been executed when MacPaint was running?  Do they launch at
:    < the proper time anyway?  Do they not launch and are lost?  Are they
:    < checkpointed, then all fire at once when you restart (reselect) IDRIS?
:    < 
:    What's scheduling? Unix proper doesn't even have it, and you wonder about
:    MacIdris?

Idris has scheduling, and depending on the background mix the processes under
MacIdris gets timeslices. Actually the scheduling even supports real-time
extensions...
    
:    < 3.  Exactly how much like UNIX is IDRIS, from a user's point of view? 
:    < What utilities are missing, and why?  I noticed that 'sed' did not
:    < appear in their list of supported utilities.
:    < 
:    If you mean by "utilities" a piece of object code which behaves like the
:    corresponding piece of code on any Unix box at all, then by definition all
:    utilities are missing. It does not even have a shell which would behave even
:    remotely like /bin/sh. See above.

The new release will have a Bourne shell, many GNU project utilities,  and
yes, vi.
    
:    Given that the compiler is useless because it doesn't even know the difference
:    between a warning and an error, and sort of muddles the distinction between
:    declaring and defining a procedure, I didn't bother to check for speed.
:    See my comment on standardization above, expand to header file names,
:    contents, and names of libraries.

Actually I'm personally impressed with the ANSI C compliant, optimizing
compiler.  A lot of people have complained about weird file names and
weird utilities, and that's what you get when you try to conform to
POSIX :-).  We did some benchmarks with the C compiler under A/UX and
the code quality was in the same level as gcc. 

:    First, you need an editor. No vi. They have some sort of MicroEmacs which I
:    didn't want to bother with.

Some people like vi, some emacs....
:    No Mac screen support like "mouse" or "scroll bars".

Yes.
:    No manual pages on disk, and precious few on paper (they cost extra).

The manual pages will be supplied on HyperCard.
    
:    < 6.  Does MacIDRIS support multi-users through the serial port?
:    < 
:    I don't know.
Yes.

:    I sent them a two-page letter with all the problems I have with their stuff
:    carefully listed (the above is about half of that). No reply to date, and that
:    was over half a year ago.
:    The actual developers are supposed to be located in Australia anyway. This may
:    or may not have anything to do with the main problem, which is that the
:    money I paid for MacIdris was basically wasted.

If you want to send the bug reports straight to the developer, send
email to john at wsa.oz.au, or AUST0282 at applelink.apple.com, I'm sure John
is interested to hear about any problems with the product.  He could
also tell more about new stuff in MacIdris. 

I don't think that the location of a product has to do anything with
local support in Germany... 

Regards,
Kent Sandvik

-- 
Kent Sandvik            --  Apple Australia Developer Tech Support
{uunet,mcvax}!munnari!appleoz.oz!ksand, ksand at appleoz.oz.au (OR ksand at apple.com)
AppleLink: AUSTAUX             Disclaimer: "Apple does not sell my opinions"