System V Release 4.0 Developer Conferences

[Henry Spencer]

I should add some clarifications on some of the things I posted; some
conversations with Sun people have led to some extra illumination.

>The kernels will be very big, probably needing a 16MB machine just to get
>started.  Nobody liked the sound of that.

This appears to have been somewhat exaggerated, but you will need 4MB, and
one wonders how good performance will be in 4 (given that existing recent
Sun releases don't exactly sparkle in 4).

>Training people to use and administer such a complex system will be
>lengthy and difficult.

People have misunderstood this to mean "training every user".  Individual
users don't have to understand the whole mess.  Unfortunately, a competent
system administrator or systems programmer *does*, and that's the real
problem area.  (The sysadmin needs to know about it all to make sure that
he isn't doing something that will have unexpected consequences; the systems
programmer needs to know what tools he's got to work with.)

>ABI implies that a conforming machine must have kernel support for both 
>NeWS *and* X.  This is ridiculous for people who plan to run neither.

I'm told that there is no particular kernel support needed, but the
relevant libraries must be present even if the machine runs no windowing
at all.  The reason is to be sure that people on that machine can use
windowing facilities on other machines, if present.
-- 
The meek can have the Earth;    |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
the rest of us have other plans.|uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu