instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases (absurdly long,sorry)

[Barry Shein]

>From: gwyn at brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>)
>Subject: Re: instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

>> 	There are also plenty of examples where AT&T adds a BSD feature,
>> but changes the command or system call name or syntax.  Isn't that
>> referred to as the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome?  When will AT&T
>> (and DEC for that matter) realize that UC Berkeley is NOT a competitor?
>
>There may be some "NIH" syndrome at work, but you should also appreciate
>that BSD software is not necessarily up to commercial standards, so it
>might need some adaptation before being supported by a commercial outfit.
>
>Unfortunately, AT&T has been picking up some of the WORST features from
>BSD.  cat -v, ls -[a-z][A-Z], yuck.

Ok Doug, it's fighting time. If by 'commercial standards' you mean
bug-free, I don't see where 4.2 has any corner on the bug market.  For
example, you should see how many core-dumps per minute I get from sdb on
my 3B5 (the only debugger, no adb or dbx, this was under R1, maybe it
got better under R2, but maybe some bugs are out under 4.3, no?) It
won't even start about 25% of the time, just dies (yes, that's vanilla C
programs, trust me, its buggy as heck.)

And 3BNet...? C'mon, that's not a feature, that's a bug. How much does
dumb, incompatible, NIH design count?  I mean, correct me if I'm wrong,
but doesn't networking have something to do with speaking to other
machines? I fought DECNET here, everyone fought SNA and now this?  Ok,
they're gonna pick up TCP/IP cause now they got a $1Billion contract
from NSA, I'm glad, but I'm not impressed by the decision-making process.

As far as I can tell, you've got to have the sources to enable FLEXNAMES
(I do and am.) Unfortunately, I am still trying to re-build comp because
a source file is just missing. I understand the arguments to keep ids
down (and they're good arguments, I agree) but that's a funny compromise.

And things that are just plain missing that are mostly taken for granted
these days, like pty's (re: 4.2, VMS, tops-20)?? (forget sxts.)

And which file system is up to commercial standards? I think I have a
lot more faith in 4.2 than the SYSV 4.1 clone (how come 4.2 sites don't
even have an 'fsdb' [file sys debug], not because they never thought of
it, they really don't need it.)

And the back-up programs, what a joke, a complete and utter joke
compared to dump/restore on 4.2 (or is file system backup and retrieval
just not important to 'commercial' sites.) Follow the suggested backup
procedures in the administrators manual, now try to recover a lost file
(not file system, just one file.) Ooops, gotta know the inode number...

Oh yeah, what about file system quotas? Completely missing in SYSV
(except for the filesize limit, better than nothing I guess.) Or, again,
is avoiding filled file systems just not something of interest to
'commercial' environments. The administrator's manual suggests running
a job several times a day to check user's usage (I guess that's if you
still have room on the disk to run the program.)

And unbundling everything useful is a real strong point (hey, don't
worry about nroff bugs, you don't get nroff! bugs fixed.) Again, maybe I
read this wrong, maybe what I don't understand about commercial sites is
that they're too stupid to take something for free when they can pay
extra for the same thing. Along the same lines, should I tell my users
to use all the nifty graphics packages? Or as soon as they get them
debugged are they gonna unbundle them? Should I project my budget to
reflect paying unbundled prices for every piece of software on the
system that my users will end up screaming for? If unbundled nroff is
here, can 'cat' be far behind? How about the accounting package, backup
software, editors, mail system, make, sccs, games (what games?),
shl, help, terminfo, cpio, debuggers (what debuggers?), C, f77....
I think price predictability is of some importance to a commercial market.

Yeah, I know, how are they gonna make a living (poor AT&T.) On the other
hand, as I said when DEC handed me the same line about VMS utilities
(which are obscenely unbundled), ok, make a living off me not buying the
whole system then, if that's your plan. I believe I have pretty much
killed the idea of VMS workstations on this campus for that reason.  Now
what am I gonna have to say about a 3B2 to remain consistent?

A -v arg to cat so it doesn't screw your terminal and a -C arg to ls so
you have a chance to to actually see more than 20 files, I can
understand your objections, but don't you think my list is a *little*
more important....honestly? (maybe that's what you meant.)

Ok, I *do* have a lot of faith in AT&T, I actually think as fast as you
are playing apologist they are filling in the gaps, I have heard very
solid rumours of a joint effort between AT&T and a 4.2 developer to just
finish the gap between the two once and for all. R2 was a huge
improvement over R1, I am very optimistic, and following SYSV right into
the whole 'phone system as network' technology coming up from AT&T
should be very exciting (not that 4.4BSD won't also have this :-)

They shouldn't be afraid to write 'unsupported' or 'not yet supported'
on a man page, it's a lot better than living without a feature for most
of us (probably not on a dump utility, but how about a csh or other
handy redundancies.)

Don't misunderstand me, I'll take SYSV over anything on the market...
except 4.2.

Hey, maybe B.U. just isn't a commercial site and doesn't understand?
But we have 2 3081s, a 4341, 19 vaxes, a 2060, 3B5, 3B2s etc etc,
a lot of the strategy recomendations come out of this office...do we
count too? How much of it is UNIX? not enough.

I think you asked for this. I also think too much of this appeared to be
pointed at you, this is actually a much broader shot.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

P.S. I may have made some small technical errors in my examples, we've
only had SYSV here a few months and R2 a couple of weeks (maybe you
*can* get a file off a backup tape by name, I couldn't see how.)
Let's try to stick to the big issues.

P.P.S. Hopefully, those at ATT who feel attacked will take this all as
constructive criticism and remember that *I* am the customer (and a
relatively happy one.)

P.P.P.S (this is getting obnoxious) Maybe it's time to form a good
ATTUS (analagous to DECUS.)

hi doug, you're the only one who got this far.