Is A/UX viable? Your advice sought

[Thad P Floryan]

rmtodd at uokmax.uucp (Richard Michael Todd) in <1990Jul31.182543.5822 at uokmax.uucp
>
wrote the first "public" response to my posting; I have also received several
e-mails which are, I'm pleased to say, encouraging. 

In appreciation for the comments and to encourage further discussion of
porting issues, I'll answer Richard's points as succinctly as possible:

	First, as to your disk formatting problems.  You're the first person I
	ever heard of who's ever done the disk formatting and partitioning
	under A/UX.  Everybody else either used Apple HD Setup or Silverlining
	to format and partition.

The formatting wasn't a problem ... the A/UX documentation is.  It never
even occurred to me that formatting under A/UX wasn't the "normal" way to do
things.

	However, *every* Unix system I've ever heard of required you to use
	the device corresponding to the full, unpartitioned disk (on A/UX,
	c?d?s31, on others ???g or somesuch) to do formats and partitioning,
	not one of the devices corresponding to a partition.  Hence, the
	requirement to use /dev/rdsk/c?d?s31 should come as no surprise.

Many UNIX systems with which I'm familiar have used "0" as the designator for
a disk as an entirety.  The docs for "diskcopy" neither detail nor specify the
steps required for formatting a HD, and it was only by chance I stumbled upon
an obscure pamphlet in which I noticed an "en passant" remark to slice "31"
representing a disk in toto.

	As I recall from back when people were porting GCC to the 3B1, they
	were having problems about as severe as the Mac porters were (mostly
	from the same reason, namely that the stock SysV compiler has fixed
	table sizes that overflow on GCC source).

True. It's been so long I have forgotten the humongous "#define"s in the gcc
source!  And there NEVER was a problem compiling GNU EMACS on the 3B1 using
the stock cpp and cc.

	Also, when was the last time AT&T shipped a new OS for the 3B1?  Not
	anytime in the last couple of years, I believe.  If they had, I
	wouldn't be surprised if you heard of things breaking on the new
	release, just as some of them seem to on A/UX 2.0.

The 3.51a kernel was released, free, from AT&T during January 1988.  The 3.51m
kernel was released January 1990, free, from AT&T, followed a month later by
the release (by AT&T (again free)) of the 3.51m kernel objects with which
anyone could customize the kernel using Mark Dapoz' "conf.c" and AT&T's
makefile.

Nothing was "broken" with any of those AT&T releases; I'm still using some
software which I last compiled back in 1987; and even commercial products such
as Microsoft Word, Ashton-Tate's dBASE-III, etc. continue to operate fine
across all the kernel and library upgrades for the 3B1 from 1985 to the
present.  And that includes the shared libraries.

What was even more amazing, at first, was that the GNU EMACS executable built
on the 3B1 runs, unchanged, on a Motorola 6350, and that the csh from the Moto
box runs on the 3B1.  Both the 3B1 and the Moto 6350 were built by Convergent,
so they're hardware compatible.  I still prefer ksh; haven't brought up "bash"
yet.  I'm still contemplating bringing up the GNU "make" on A/UX so as to get
my hands wet (so to speak) before diving into porting the big project.

	The current A/UX 2.0 C compiler has a command-line option to boost the
	table sizes, making it possible to compile GCC.  Not that it's really
	important, since GCC binaries are already available for ftp, and once
	you've got GCC, there's no problem.

Right!  I ftp'd the files from apple.com this past weekend and all seems to be
functioning fine.

	Well, I don't think I've ever done 400 object files, but I have done
	700K (and larger) executable. gcc-cc1 is ~500K, and it was linked
	using A/UX ld.  Check out the -A (I think) option to boost the table
	size as big as you want.

This comment, and others I've received in e-mail, are exactly what I'm pleased
to hear!  None of the prior-seen discussions in this newsgroup have touched
on matters like this and I was gravely concerned that I might have dug myself
into a pit committing to taking over an otherwise-doomed project.  Several
test-compiles of various source files were done today and it appears like
we're not going to be hitting any unsurmountable obstacles.  Whew.  :-)

Actually, I really wasn't too worried, just concerned.  After having ported
much of the 4.3BSD "Tahoe" networking software suite to the 3B1 in just one
weekend a month ago, there's not much that can faze me now!  :-)

	I haven't heard of any other programs that have obviously broken under
	A/UX 2.0.  Certainly I haven't run across any, though I've only
	recompiled a few programs so far (smail, deliver, C News).  I've heard
	reports on the net that X11R4 still compiles under A/UX 2.0 without
	problems.  Is 50+ Meg of source that still compiles enough to convince
	you? :-)

Yes!  And I've received independent corroboration of that X11R4 port earlier
today from the porter (portee?) along with a few caveats which I'll summarize
for this newsgroup shortly.

Thank you for your comments and observations.

Thad

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]