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From: mycroft@kropotki.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: New HP machines Bad News for NeXT??
Message-ID: <MYCROFT.91May24025134@kropotki.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 24 May 91 06:51:34 GMT
References: <yjbHjqu9@cs.psu.edu> <HARDY.91May20174558@golem.ps.uci.edu>
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In-reply-to: rsk@gynko.circ.upenn.edu's message of 21 May 91 16:30:22 GMT

In article <43578@netnews.upenn.edu> rsk@gynko.circ.upenn.edu (Rich Kulawiec) writes:

   In article <ur2Hc*?9@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
   >HP-UX seems to be different enough, that pulling programs off the net
   >and compiling them is nontrivial.  [...] HP pulled off a major
   >coup with the Snakes, but from what I hear their OS is a major drawback.  

   HP-UX is gratuitously different from BSD and SYSV in so many ways that
   I'd rank second only to AIX in non-usability.  My advice is to spend
   the extra $$ to buy MORE/BSD from MT Xinu, which is real Berkeley Unix
   plus NFS plus lots of bug fixes plus lots of FSF software.  Use your
   HP-UX tapes and manuals as fireplace starter.

Let me state (some of) my experience here.

I currently use HP/UX 7.0 on 3 HP 9000/834's.

The only significant BSD library functions that I've found that were *not*
included in either libc or libBSD [Did you forget about that?] are usleep(),
re_comp(), and re_exec().

Now, personally, (and probably my location will give away why) I use the GNU
re_comp() and re_exec(), which I snarfed from GNU Emacs.  For usleep() I use
a cheap hack snarfed from the X11 distribution, which would be easy enough to
duplicate.

These are, quite honestly, the only portability problems I've encountered.
And I have ported (with little or no modification) X sources, various IP domain
socket code, several GNU utilities [;-)], and A Whole Bunch More (tm).

And, for those of you worried about shared libraries, that's been fixed in
HP/UX 8.0, which *is* shipping; I just don't happen to have it yet.

Now if I could only teach NFS about context dependent files and access control
lists...