Is A/UX viable? Your advice sought

[Richard Todd]

thad at cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) writes:
>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.

Aha.  I think I recall you saying that you had A/UX 1.1?  Well, I just looked
at my copies of the release notes.  The release notes for 1.0 included a nice
8-page or so section on how to hook up, format, and partition for A/UX an
external hard drive, including telling you how to format the drive using Apple
HDSC Setup, how to use dp to repartion, and explaining how s31 is the whole
disk.  However, for no well-explained reason, this entire section is absent
from the 1.1 Release Notes.  In short, Apple screwed up on the docs.  
Fortunately, A/UX 2.0 comes with a book, "Setting Up Accounts and Peripherals
on Your A/UX System", which includes a chapter on doing the formatting/
partitioning, including showing you how to do the partitioning with HDSC Setup.

>	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

>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

Yeah, but how much actually changed in those releases?  Just at a guess from
the version numbers, one would expect that going from 3.51a to 3.51m is a 
lot smaller change than going from A/UX 1.1 to A/UX 2.0.  

>Nothing was "broken" with any of those AT&T releases; I'm still using some
>software which I last compiled back in 1987; 

Most of the software I'm using on this system hasn't been recompiled since 
1.1; some of it (like the working copy of GNU Emacs 18.44 I have) haven't 
been touched since A/UX 1.0.  All the X11R4 binaries on my system are left
over from A/UX 1.1.  

>present.  And that includes the shared libraries.

It's unfortunate that I mentioned shared libraries, as my further
investigations showed that shared libraries apparently had nothing to do 
with my Emacs woes.  The problem seems to be in handling SIGTSTP, and is 
something that the Emacs 18.54 port I got from wuarchive is doing, as my 
copy of the Emacs 18.44 port (the one that's so old it called A/UX by its
pre-release name, Oreo), compiles and runs *just fine* under A/UX 2.0. 

>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.

  Helpful hint.  There's one place in GNU Make where they call one function 
(setvbuf(), I believe).  For no well explained reason, SVR3 and pre-SVR3 
systems apparently disagree on the arguments passed to setvbuf, and contrary to
what you would expect, A/UX has the SVR3 version.  So lie to it and tell it
A/UX is SVR3 in the config. options.  There are maybe 2-3 other minor little
things that have to be twiddled; these are left to the porter as an exercise
:-).

>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!  :-)

Yow.  And you were worried about a little port to A/UX? :-).