Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!caen!umich!terminator!dabo.citi.umich.edu!rees From: rees@dabo.citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: The Hardy Few Message-ID: <50d9ecab.cb12@dabo.citi.umich.edu> Date: 8 Apr 91 14:37:17 GMT References: <1991Apr5.023527.16647@alphalpha.com> <1991Apr6.072832.4012@cs.ubc.ca> Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news) Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees) Distribution: comp,world Organization: University of Michigan ITD Lines: 34 In article <1991Apr6.072832.4012@cs.ubc.ca>, pphillip@cs.ubc.ca (Peter Phillips) writes: I'd rather have some psuedo-ttys that work properly than a window manager for X which likes to put a window on top of the current window and then beeps at you because a there is output in a window it just obscured :-). I don't think anyone is defending the DM as a window manager. I use tvtwm myself. The parts of the DM that I like are the fast, server-based universal editor (you can do this with emacs but it's slow) and the pads. As for NFS, it has at least two advantages over the Apollo file system: a) It is stateless. A curse and a blessing, I must admit, but at least diskless machines don't crash if the server does. On the other hand, you do have to live with "NFS server not responding..." occasionally. I haven't heard anyone defend stateless file systems in a while. Even the Sun file system guys are a little embarassed about statelessness now. I think the future of file systems lies in large local caches. Your diskless node won't crash, or even hang, if you've got everything cached locally. But that's in the future. For right now, I prefer correctness over convenience, so I stay away from NFS. For completeness, I should probably make some sort of motor vehicle analogy but I can't think of an apt one at the moment. When I started running X, I went out and bought a '72 Buick that gets eight miles to the gallon. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. By the way, I started writing a DM-pad emulator for X. It sort of almost works. The problem is that it's hard to tell when the program at the other end of the pty has eaten all its input.