Snakebytes (long -- and poisonous?).

[Van Cleef Henry H]

In article <17746 at uudell.dell.com> sblair at upurbmw.dell.com (Steve Blair) writes:
>In article <1991Apr04.172441.22142 at cello.hpl.hp.com>, renglish at cello.hpl.hp.com (Bob English) writes:
>
>|> If most of the systems he
>|> works with are BSD-based, a single SysV based machine, or a new group of
>|> them will be painful to administer.  Many of the scripts that he's
>|> written won't work correctly, and the user community will complain that
>|> things don't work as they used to.
>|> 
>|> --bob--
>|> renglish at hplabs
>
>*************
>
>I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything, but this statement
>Bob, is patently *mis-leading*. Just because things dont' 100% work
>the same thing the same way does not imply, or *mean* that
>there's something "wrong" with an operating system.
>
>For example:
>
>I've spent many, many years in BSD systems' environments. Now as
>a member of the UNIX groups at DELL, I find myself working in
>new ways. Very, VERY few things that worked before in BSD land
>don't work in SYS V.4 . I've got a csh that works great, my pick
>of cc's that I wish to utilize, as well as library, and include
>file support for both environments. When assisting new users, I 
>give them the *choice* of deciding if they'd like things to be
>as the "knew & loved" in BSD land, or to explore new territories
>in SVR4.
>
>My scripts that worked on BSD systems work quite fine here, at 
>least in DELL V.4, and programs that I used to run under X in
>BSD land were exceptionally trivial to have work in V.4 land.
>
>Please carefully evaluate an operating system's "particulars"
>before branding things that may well work as well, or better
>than other environments.....
>
>regards,
>
>-- 
>Steve Blair	DELL	UNIX	DIVISION sblair at upurbmw.dell.com
>================================================================
I have left in a rather long quote, rather than cut it or attempt to
summarize.

What Dell is offering in SysV.4 I don't know.  However, I can attest to
"administrative function differences" from running an Ultrix system
alongside (and connected to) a 386 with SCO UnixV.3 and a 286 running
Xenix.   My recollection is that running almost anything that required 
privileges (plain su in Ultrix and Xenix, a rather painful-to-set-up 
hierarchy in SCO Unix) also required different commands, command 
formats, dealt with different files in different directories.  
Now, granted, Dell's Unix---which I have never seen advertised or 
described---may be more like Ultrix.  Interactive is another ball game.

One of the things that makes difficult for the "novice" user as compared
with MS-DOS is the need to administer the system---if nothing else, to
set up accounts and passwords, start and stop the system.  

As  to commonalities between shell scripts, I submit for consideration
the Makefiles for C-Kermit and X11.  

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