Cave Men and Dinosaurs

[Ron Flax]

In article <numb.675098076 at el_greco> numb at cs.qmw.ac.uk writes:
>I'm getting more and more fed up of trying to bring software from usenet
>up on our A/UX machines. So few things compile without considerable massaging

Matt,

I'd like to hear what software you are trying to port.  I have quite
easily ported many things that have been posted/available on USENET to
A/UX.  A/UX provides most everything you need to port BSD, SYSV, and
even POSIX apps. All of the relevent USENET news software, less, emacs,
gcc, gdb, gas, rn, tcsh, ntp, nntp, etc, etc, etc... So what's the problem.

>Help! When are Apple going to make a serious comitment to Unix and bring their
>OS upto date, alot of vendors are now shipping SVR4 and Apple is very proud
>to manage to ship SRV2 :-(.

Granted SVR2 by it self is a rather old version of UNIX, A/UX includes most
of the feature set in todays SVR4.  What features would you like to
see.  Have you actually used a SVR4 system, have you tried porting
USENET software to it?  Ever try porting a character based device driver to
SVR4 streams?

>Users find systems far more "open" if they can take sources and compile and run
>them on a number of Unix/Posix/XPRG etc etc (insert favorite Unix std. OSF/1 !)
>without to many problems.

Actually OSF/1 is only XPG2 compliant, with the hopes that the next
release will be XPG3 compliant.  That's about equivalent to SVID 2.

>So, what do you say Apple, are you serious about Unix or is it a filler until
>System 7 is fully underway.

We are very serious about UNIX, our development staff has more than
doubled in the past 6-12 months and we are continuing to improve A/UX as
we go.

>We have ~172 machines runnignn A/UX 2.0.

Yes I know, I was at QMW in April of this year... You really should be
running A/UX 2.0.1 which is the current release now.

--
Ron Flax
ron at afsg.apple.com	
Apple Federal Systems Group