Asdcsvax.302 NET.general utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!sdcsvax!jmcg Wed May 27 05:14:07 1981 EUNICE report We received EUNICE several weeks ago. This review is mostly first impressions. (Some of the criticisms are more properly directed at VMS.) 1) EUNICE does almost all of the things that it claims to do, but not all the things you may have been led to expect. The emulation of the UNIX environment is sufficiently good that programs using only stdio seem to run fine, providing they don't try to construct file names that do not map into sensible VMS file names. In particular, `ex', `vi' and the collection of standard tools work indistinguishably from the way they work under UNIX. 2) EUNICE documentation is inadequate under the circumstances of binary-only distribution. This is a bit overstated, actually. EUNICE itself is about as well documented as UNIX system calls are, but the software supplied to UNIX licensees is simply there. The `csh' limps until you discover or divine that `.cshrc' becomes `cshrc.csh', the properties of the added command `dcl' are perplexing, and there seem to be a number of fairly standard csh features which don't work (it's a 3BSD level csh), e. g. (date;date)& only prints the date once, and the csh terminates. Although codefiles are supplied for UUCP, I haven't been able yet to configure things so it works (configuring uucp has always been a pain, though). 3) EUNICE requires extra processes. This is not normally a problem, but our VMS system had been tuned to balance space requirements for the swap file against maximizing the working set for one large batch job and EUNICE pushed this balance towards a lot more page faults. 4) EUNICE is incomplete. I haven't had a chance to talk to Dave Kashtan since I put EUNICE up, but I understand he's working on the command interpreter interface business to allow sensible execution of DCL commands. This is important, since UNIX users tend to strongly dislike interacting with DCL. As it is, there are too many necessary things that require an escape out to DCL. [Escaping into DCL is a problem for another reason. One's EUNICE-supported environment disappears when one drops out of csh, so it is preferable to escape `upward' using the `dcl' command of the csh. The DCL one gets has not preserved any defined symbols nor does it pick up the login.com file (there is no equivalent to .cshrc), so extra work is often required to re-adapt DCL before it can be used. It also won't go away until one types a ^C and can't be invoked as a part of a shell script.] 5) EUNICE does not encourage tidiness. Naive users will tend to have a large number of file versions laying around. This is problem with VMS anyway, but the tools to deal with the problem are one step removed from EUNICE users. 6) EUNICE is a lot better than the old version of Software Tools, but the newer Software Tools VOS should be considered by operations where unix source-level compatability is less of a concern. If you *must* run VMS on your VAX, having EUNICE available is a decided advantage, but not a panacea. Jim McGinness U C San Diego; Chemistry ucbvax!sdcsvax!jmcg (714)452-4016 P. S. Perhaps there should be a new newsgroup: NET.eunice? ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.