Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Are sockets the wave of the future?
Message-ID: <3981@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 29 Aug 90 21:11:17 GMT
References: <1990Aug25.183437.1@rogue.llnl.gov> <725@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <1990Aug28.212241.10099@Think.COM>
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 26

>Are you saying that Sun does not actually suggest that TLI be preferred
>over sockets for new programs?

I suspect what he's saying that that different people within Sun say
different things, and that he doesn't agree with the authors of those
statments in chapters 10 and 11.  Which of those people speak for Sun,
if any, is a different matter.  (Sun is sufficiently large that it's not
clear the statement "Sun says XXX" is necessarily meaningful; even if
one particular Sun document says "do XXX", that may not mean it's
official corporate policy.)

>Of course, if a program is intended to be portable to other systems that
>only have sockets then Sun's recommendation should be ignored.  And Sun
>will have to continue to support sockets for the foreseeable future, so
>such programs will also be portable to SunOS.

And S5R4 has a sockets interface, at least for TCP/UDP/IP (given that
Berkeley has, I think, modified the sockets interface for ISO - just as
AT&T had to modify the STREAMS/TLI interface for TCP, by putting in the
notion of an "urgent mark" - I don't know whether, even if you can use
the sockets library to talk to other protocols, you would do so in the
same way you did under 4.3-Reno or 4.4BSD).

And then you can look forward to POSIX's networking interfaces; I don't
know if either of them (DNI in particular) will look like sockets,
STREAMS+TLI, or none of the above....