instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Peter da Silva]

> running on a broken system.  You didn't make it clear in your original
> comments that this is what you'd done.

What I did (for the last time) is take the program, look up "ioctl" and
"tty" in the appropriate sections of the manual, see that there were no
changes or surprises, and compile. The manual did NOT contain any refs
for termio in ioctl(2). Since the system is now SV, I can't check the
SV code to see if it works on the putative SIII system.

> The fact that you tried doing the same "compile and go without changes" on
> somebody else's S5 system, where the UNIX/TS compatibility had *not* been
> replaced with V7 compatibility, says nothing about S3, S5, V7, or their
> relative compatibility.  It says something about the vendors' documentation
> (they should have told people about the new tty driver) and about your
> willingness to read documentation (you yourself admitted that you hadn't
> *read* the documentation until recently).

I hadn't read the SYSTEM V docs until about a week after I started porting
the program because I couldn't get them until them. That was several months
ago, so if that's how you define recently, fine. I was never unwilling to
read the docs, just unable to get them. The system I was working on and
the docs were (and still are) over 30 miles away, at the house of a person
with extremely exotic hours.

> > Peter da Silva (wondering why he's still flaming me over VMIN and VTIME).
> 
> Because it's *very* tiresome reading somebody making the same incorrect
> statement over and over again.

Who are you talking about?

> It's unfortunate that the vendor's
> documentation, or somebody, didn't make the tty driver differences clear,

The standard Bell system V documentation didn't make it clear. Look at page
6 of the docs again.

> and that it wasn't made clear that S3 and S5 don't normally have a
> V7 compatibility mode.

It wasn't made clear that SIII was anything but V7 with SCCS. In afct the
system involved WASN'T anything but V7 with SCCS and a few other SIII
utilities. SV is a different matter. I made the comment the SIII and SV were
incompatible in one message. I apologised for the error and explained where
and why I made the mistake. u!Some time AFTERWARDS you flamed me about it.
Now I don't know whether that was network delay or you just not reading
messages from me directed explicitly at you or what, but if it wasn't
a case of network delay it was completely unjustified.

> require you to do things differently, in general, 2) some systems support V7
> compatibility, but not all, and 3) just because a V7 program worked on an S3
> system which was modified to support V7 ioctls does NOT mean that if the

You mean a V7 system modified to support the SIII utilities.

> program doesn't work on an S5 system not so modified that a) S3 and S5 or
> incompatible, b) you don't have to worry about MIN and TIME if you use the
> S3/S5 ioctls or c) that the S5 which doesn't support the V7 ioctls is
> "broken".

I never said it was. I said that SV broke the SIII ioctls. As far as I was
able to discern at the time it did. I'm not at a large corporation or Bell
where I can get the documentation on every system I might happen to be working
on (I'm an independant contractor, so I work on LOTS of machines) on short
notice. I still have not got access to the SIII docs.

NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD HAS ACCESS TO THE RESOURCES YOU DO!

I made a mistake. I apologised for it. I explained why I made it. I still
don't know why you found it necessary to badger me for it at a later date.

> It's fairly clear that you don't have a thorough understanding of
> the differences between the TTY drivers.

How thorough do you want? I don't have a copy of the sources at hand, nor
any of the ancilliary documents on the subject. I have the slightly obscure
and ambigious documentation that Bell supplied, and using this I have
managed to get several peices of screen-oriented software up on V7, 4.2,
kinky SIII, kinky V7, and SV. It has been my experience that most
implementations have differences in the drivers, but never had I run into
as great a difference as that between SV and all the other systems I had
used (with the exception of RSX :->). I have a problem remaining with
a host-side XMODEM program that core dumps on SV. It's heavily patched
code that includes stuff ported from MS-DOS and 4.2, as well as my own code.
It has worked efficiently up to now. I don't know what on SV crashes it,
and since the terminal driver is the biggest problem I have so far I
immediately suspected it. I'm still not sure there's not a problem there...

> Could you please find a discussion
> where you have something to contribute other than content-free flames?
> 
> 	Guy Harris

Could you please discuss this without putting words into my mouth? Reply
to net.flame.
-- 
	Peter (Made in Australia) da Silva
		UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter
		MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076