Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!strath-cs!baird!jim From: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: Switching from Sun to HP: some general questions Message-ID: Date: 15 Apr 91 10:57:15 GMT References: <16710082@hpisod2.cup.hp.com> <1991Apr14.053212.24266@johnny5.uucp> Sender: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk Organization: Computer Science Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Glasgow, Scotland. Lines: 29 In-reply-to: garvey@johnny5.uucp's message of 14 Apr 91 05:32:12 GMT In article <1991Apr14.053212.24266@johnny5.uucp> garvey@johnny5.uucp (Joe Garvey) writes: HPUX is an excellent integration of BSD/SYSV. You should have very little effort porting (esp if you designed your software to do so). I must disagree with this. HP-UX is an awful thing to port code to. The kernel is BSD dressed up to look like System V. [The older releases were infuriating because the kernel contained the code for things like long file names and reliable signals, but wouldn't let you run it for the sake of SVID compilance!] HP has its own object file format which makes life hard if you're writing a debugger/linker etc. (It was really painful to get gcc up on HP boxes.) Practically nothing can be installed without tweaking makefiles or config files. In my experience, it has never, ever been possible to install anything on HP-UX simply by reading in the tape and just typing make, as can be done on other platforms like SunOS. This is because of the schizophrenic SysV/BSD OS. If you say the OS is System V, most software assumes you don't have sockets (you've got streams instead) and you've got COFF format. Neither assumption is true for HP-UX. If you say you've got BSD, the compiles fail because they see SysV include files and #defines. Unfortunately, not many people write code to cover the case where an OS has BSD sockets, System V include files, a non-standard object format, a System V C library with some BSD bits flung in (and others in a "compatibility" library) and numerous other weirdoes. Jim