From: mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst)
Subject: Re: Xenix considered harmful (was Re: SCO support - a success story)
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 20:32:11 GMT
Organization: The Programmer's Pit Stop, Ann Arbor MI

In article <9209061050.AA05570@dynamix.com> david@dynamix.com (David L Jarvis) writes:
>How about all those segmentation violations that arose from the 286 not
>having hardware memory protection?

Well, we're picking nits here, but I can't resist.  During most of my
experience with Xenix/286, you'd get a machine lockup more frequently
than you'd get a segvio.  Segvios were more frequently caused by
a large-model program that tried to assume pointers and ints were the
same size.

>Why haven't you forced this client and others like them to switch to Unix?
>WOW!!!  Could it be that ... perhaps ... they don't NEED Unix???!!!  
>You said it yourself Marc, Xenix serves their needs just fine, and THATS
>what we've all been saying right along ...

Well, we haven't switched them to Unix because they don't have the
money and because there was really no need.  However, they very
narrowly averted the need quite recently: Their 2400bps modem broke,
and they were thinking about getting a V.32 or V.32bis modem to
replace it.  Good thing they decided to go with another 2400bps modem,
because I doubt their 286/10 running Xenix/286 would have been able to
keep up with a V.32 or V.32bis modem.

>So what I meant by mature and stable was that it's had more time to have
>all the major problems resolved, and to become more refined ...

I'd hardly call Xenix "refined".  "Old", maybe, but old does not
mature make.

>What would inittab provide that /etc/ttys doesn't?  Under *normal*
>circumstances, /etc/ttys w/ enable/disable does just fine.  

Uh, there are lots of things you can do with inittab that you can't do
with /etc/ttys.  Like spawn something that's not called "/etc/getty".
There are other things I could go into, but they have more to do with
the SysV-style rc scripts vs. the V7-style rc scripts.

>Oh please ... the configure script makes this simple and painless ...
>who cares what "style" configuration the system uses as long as it 
>works ... I've never once had a problem configuring Xenix ...

You obviously haven't ever tried to add more than one or two
third-party drivers to a Xenix system.  I have.  And then I had to
clean up the link_xenix script with an editor because the drivers had
each stomped on each other.

>Nope - I've always used smail ... never had a problem with it either 
>(why buy an inferior SCO product when a free on will do?)

That's not the point.  We could all go run BSD/386 instead of SCO, or
replace our entire /bin and /usr/bin with the GNU equivalents.
Sure, you *can* get domain-based e-mail running on a Xenix system, but
it's an unbelievable amount of trouble to rip out the Xenix e-mail
system and replace it with your own.

>So Unix is better than Xenix because you don't want to learn Xenix?
>Sure it's different, but are all Unixes out there the same?  Hell no.

Yes, Unix is better than Xenix because it's the same as other
Unix-based products.  Again, we're coming back the standards argument.
The primary reason a lot of our customers use Unix on PCs is because
it interoperates well with their other Unix machines.  Xenix *may* be
appropriate if interoperability is not and never will be a concern,
but I don't believe *anyone* can say that in this day and age.

-- 
Marc Unangst                | Real men don't use Windows.  Real men use X. 
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us   | Only a real man would use a GUI where the
                            | shift keys after "Alt" are "Super" and "Hyper."
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix.sco