Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!umich!terminator!dabo.ifs.umich.edu!rees
From: rees@dabo.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: convergence ???
Keywords: DomainOs, HP-UX, OSF
Message-ID: <1990Jun14.165124.15493@terminator.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 90 16:51:24 GMT
References: <1640@tuvie>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
Lines: 40

In article <1640@tuvie>, mike@tuvie (Inst.f.Techn.Informatik) writes:
> I have been told that HP's aim is to have DomainOS, HP-UX (and 
> possibly OSF) converge into one operating system. How is this 
> supposed to work? Will they simply kill DomainOS and create 
> some compatiblity box for DomainOS programs to run under either
> HP-UX or OSF?

My guess is that eventually HPUX (pronounced "hippucs") and Domain/OS will
both go away in favor of OSF.  This won't happen for a while because there
are plenty of big vendors (Mentor, for example) that depend on the old
operating systems.  They may go into maintenance mode, and in fact Domain/OS
already has, more or less.  Sr10 was the last big change in Domain/OS and
it's two years old now.

> What I fear is that two of the features I like 
> most about DomainOS will fanish, namely the //directory (its cleaner 
> than mounting all hosts in the / directory) and the possiblity 
> to have variable size swap space. 
> DomainOS unfortunately still has lots of incompatibilities with 
> UNIX (which from a UNIX user's point of view are simply bugs, not
> ``features''), but I hope that those will be gone within the next
> year or so

You can't have both new features and compatibility.  For example, the
//netroot that you like so much breaks plenty of programs.  Even the
simplest things, like widening the mtime in the stat struct to 64 bits so
you can have microseconds, will break old programs.  The sad thing is that
in most cases, the program was broken to begin with, but its defects only
show up when you try to add a new feature to your operating system.  People
don't care about this, though.  The only thing they care about is "your
operating system broke my program."

Even fixing bugs can be dangerous.  Lots of programs depend on operating
system bugs!  One of the slogans for Domain/IX (remember?) was "Bug-for-Bug
compatible with Unix" (that one never made it to marketing!)

I'm personally optimistic.  Although OSF/1 doesn't have many of the things
that make Domain/OS special to me, I think OSF/2 with DCE will come pretty
close.  OSF/2 is probably about two years off (my guess, not OSF's), so that
should give you a clue as to how long Domain/OS will be around at a minimum.