Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!ken
From: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: Re: OSFdecision to use Decorum
Message-ID: <41689@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 4 Jun 90 00:44:06 GMT
References: <65@decvax.decvax.dec.com.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 37

In article <65@decvax.decvax.dec.com.UUCP> evans@decvax.DEC.COM writes:
>Now that OSF has announced that it will use Decorum, will this decision impact
>the future directions of the ISIS project? ... etc

Our effort has a commercial side as well as a research side and IDS
will certainly be looking very hard at Decorum.  There are actually
fewer areas of overlap then you may think, though, in that ISIS is really
a fairly conventional user of the sorts of services Decorum provides (ie
time service, name service, file system) and does not itself define many
of these sorts of services in the present release.

As you may be aware, we actually submitted ISIS under the OSF DCE RFT.
OSF looked hard at ISIS and basically concluded that it lives at a higher
level of the system than the DCE is aimed at, but on the other hand that
something like ISIS may belong in the OSF offerings in the future.  We 
intend to maintain a dialog with them, and they have indicated that they
plan to do so with us.  My guess is that there will be some sort of an
RFT in the future under which systems like ISIS would fit, and that we will 
resubmit the system then.

I have been very impressed by the technical strength of the OSF crowd.
With respect to ISIS, they know exactly what we have and have made a
very reasonable (if conservative) decision to postpone these issues
until process-group technologies mature.  At the same time, Decorum
apparently does anticipate the need to support process groups in the
future.

As for specific changes to ISIS to make use of Decorum, though, we'll
need to wait and see how best to do this.  For example, I wouldn't like
to get into a situation where ISIS under Decorum can't talk to ISIS under
the UI systems of the future!  On the other hand, we will certainly "port"
ISIS to Decorum at some point (or IDS will), and will try to do this in
the least intrusive way possible.  Decorum is, realistically, only one
of several exciting new systems -- Chorus being another, and the system
that SUN is (rumored) to be developing being a third...

Ken