Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!husc6!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: ENIX V.3.2 info
Message-ID: <36041@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 8 Aug 89 03:21:29 GMT
References: <4YlaPoO00WB5QCWGBM@andrew.cmu.edu> <803@micropen>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 56

In article <803@micropen> dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) writes:
|In article <4YlaPoO00WB5QCWGBM@andrew.cmu.edu>, zs04+@andrew.cmu.edu (Zachary T. Smith) writes:
|Erroneous missing items:
|
|> o       a debugger (dbx is not there).
|
|sdb is included and *is* a debugger.  Adb is not included.

We tried it and found it lacking.  It's better than nothing, but not
much.  When bringing up GNU emacs, a bug in the optimizer causes fns.c
to compile incorrectly.  This exists in all variants of AT&T 386 UNIX
which use the AT&T compiler.  Under Interactive we were able to track
down the problem (mostly -- a helpful ISC employee aided us, too).
Under ENIX (*was* called ENIX then) the debugger just didn't work.

|> o       A real 'mv' command (it doesn't relocate directories; there's
|>         a shell script called mvdir to do this).
|
|See /usr/lib/mv_dir.  Works for me.

Should be called automagically by mv.  /usr/lib isn't in my path, nor
do I believe it should be.

|Equivalant set of code from SCO Xenix would price out at $2875!  So $610
|looks to be quite a bargain.

Yes ... and no.  For the price there is nothing else, but I'd
recommend Interactive even though a really workable system will cost
about $900-$1000 (a lot less if you don't care about X windows or
networking; more if you need NFS).

We didn't get ENIX up and running on a network so no comments on that.
We did try running X windows and found their version abysmally slow
and missing a variety of necessary X utilities (xset comes to mind; if
not that, something equally important).  Looks like it was a
quick-and-dirty port and they just didn't bother including anything
that didn't work right off the bat.  In contrast, the Interactive X
was remarkably fast (beat the Sun 386i version and was running on a
much slower processor, under SysV, and in less memory).  Interactive
even went so far as to include X utilities off the net which were not
in the X11R3 release.  We never bothered to try the XENIX X since it
was R2.

As a development system, I recommend Interactive over both ENIX and
XENIX.  I expect ENIX will grow into something more usable, but in its
current state it's pretty tough to develop on.  XENIX is, well, XENIX,
with all that implies in terms of strangenesses, compiler problems,
etc.

One last thing to note:  XENIX will run beautifully in 4Mb; the others
really want 6Mb or more.  But for the price difference you can get
quite a lot of memory.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd@std.com