Ultrix and 4.2 and der Mouse

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

Even not having read the follow-ups on this, I want to make some quick
comments:

In article <997 at udenva.UUCP> wedgingt at udenva.UUCP (Will Edgington/Ejeo) writes:
>                   ...  Nearly all our disks are ra81s and ra80s; they have
>been at the root of all hardware failures under BSD *or* Ultrix in the year
>I've worked here.

RA drives I've worked with: no problems at all w/RA81; a few problems
with one RA60; but in general OK.  The main problem -- this was under
the SysV machine I work with -- was verifying that my driver worked,
since two drives started off not working!  Once fixed, though, they
seem to have stayed fixed (mostly).  Admittedly, we haven't thrashed
them yet.

>                                    ...  Ultrix won't have these partly because
>we don't have source and partly because DEC has learned from 4.2's failures
>and fixed them already.

'Fraid I have to burst your bubble.  If you have Ultrix 1.0 or 1.1,
the source code compatibility to 4.2 goes as far as not including any
of the bug fixes I'd installed, anyway.

>      ...  Under Ultrix, no source.  So I copied the BSD driver over, reconfig,
>slight mods to the makefile to add the driver as a source file, and a make.
>NO CHANGES TO SOURCE CODE.  If that's not compatibility, I don't know what is.

You're lucky.  The driver I had to fix under Ultrix (hp.c) had been
modified once in 1.0, then heavily in 1.1.  To make it work (before we
bit the bullet and got source), I had to do some reverse engineering.
I even got a few things wrong: such as which printf's had been changed
to mprintf's, and of course a few variable names.  (Amazingly few: i
and cp are universal.)

For that matter, you probably did break error logging, since mprintf()
is not in 4.2BSD.

>    ...  Identical system directory structure and username/UID pairs has helped.

Yes, for the most part.  A major problem was uucp.  (Tip doesn't
suffer because it only uses the top of the uucp spool directory.)
There may have been others.

>  Fifth, while we are an educational institution, that has little to do with
>our preference for BSD over Ultrix:  no students, not even workstudies in my
>department (which is *NOT* academic; it is an administrative department) have
>access to any system source, ...

Same here.  We just felt that for some things maintenance would be
much easier with source.  Looks like we were right so far.

So with all these complaints, why did this group get Ultrix?  Well,
I'll tell you.  It is a supported product (or will be ...) by the
maker of the CPU (at least), and that is valued.  Once we get up to
equal speed with each other, things should be great.

>BSD and Ultrix are otherwise equal in our eyes.

And with 1.2, Ultrix may edge ahead.  (Ultrix has some of 4.3's speed
enhancements; I don't know what-all else.)
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}