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From: pato@apollo.UUCP.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Domain IX talk program
Message-ID: <8705131324.AA18623@apollo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-May-87 09:01:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: apollo.8705131324.AA18623
Posted: Wed May 13 09:01:55 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 16-May-87 04:52:55 EDT
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References: <870507021718.495325@HI-MULTICS.ARPA> <34d5ba17.352b@apollo.uucp>
Cc: 
Bcc: FILE://munin/pato/nfs_mail/cc

[ This may be a duplicate submission - sorry ]

In article <34d5ba17.352b@apollo.uucp> scofield@apollo.UUCP (Cary Scofield) writes:

>...            you might want to get some of your information straight:
>in the first place, "talk" is not supported by Apollo, and as such,
>Apollo has no obligation to guarantee that it runs correctly with 
>each and every software release.

Let me correct some inaccuracies.  Cary was confusing an internal program
called "talk", which is not supported, with the DOMAIN/IX bsd4.2 talk program.
Apollo does ship and support the standard bsd4.2 talk software with sr9.5.

Now let me address Tim Giebelhaus' original complaints.

>    1) I can't get people to use talk to establish a connction to me unless
>    I talk to them first.  I assume that is because my name is more than 8
>    characters long.  Please, either support longer names or don't support
>    them.  

        He is right.  We chose to limit usernames to 8 characters in "talk"
        to conform to the talk protocol.  If we had allowed longer names you
        would not be able to use talk to communicate with users on other
        vendors' equipment. (You might consider this a little misguided since
        talk transmits its data structures in native form and 
        therefore can only communicate with machines that have the same data
        representation.  This method also requires that the various compilers 
        layout structures in the same way... However we chose to allow the
        possibility of interconnection at the expense of users who have longer
        names.)

        Had we implemented talk from scratch we would have used NCS which
        defines heterogeneous protocols, but then, talk would not have been
        the bsd4.2 version of talk!

        In the future, it will be easier for a site to force all accounts to
        conform to pure UNIX properties (i.e., you will be able to prevent
        usernames from being longer than 8 characters so that all UNIX programs
        that assume 8 character login names will work).

>    2) Talk seems to hang people who are logged in over an sio port.  When
>    you exit talk, you dead in the water; you never get back to the shell,
>    you never log out, you just sit there until someone does a sigp -s on
>    the process.

        Yep, this is true.  It is a bug.  Please file a UCR.


  Joe Pato              UUCP: ...{attunix,uw-beaver,decvax!wanginst}!apollo!pato
  Apollo Computer Inc.  ARPA: apollo!pato@mit-eddie.arpa

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