Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!think!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!HI-MULTICS.ARPA!Giebelhaus From: Giebelhaus@HI-MULTICS.ARPA Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: AEGIS/UN*X Message-ID: <870609150939.860039@HI-MULTICS.ARPA> Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 11:09:00 EDT Article-I.D.: HI-MULTI.870609150939.860039 Posted: Tue Jun 9 11:09:00 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jun-87 03:50:54 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Distribution: world Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 82 Robert Reed writes: I don't have to suffer through complete emersion before having a good gut feeling about DM. That is just what I am saying. You need more than a gut feeling to pass judgement. For things like electric-C and such, you do need something like emacs. I wish the DM editor were easier to expand, but that is a fault of the DM. For doing things like editing troff input, though, I will always used the DM unless I am on a terminal. I can do things with an Emacs package driving the UNIX dbx debugger that would make users of debug drool with envy. Have you posted these additions to emacs? Can you? If you can get more fuctionallity than debug, I want the tool. The thought of doing a major software project under standard BSD just makes me cringe, though. Funny, I have the same reaction to doing it under a strictly AEGIS environment. Can you tell me why? And what is stricly aegis? I can run emacs under aegis if I have the unix libraries. I find that it is not so much UNIX that I like, but all the tool that come out under it. If I could have all the UNIX tools, I would rather work under Aegis. I won't buy any arguements stating that the tools could not be developed under Aegis. Aegis is a better base to build upon than is UNIX (I mean the UNIX without the tools). Whoa, what a mouthful! I know people who refer to it as "dizzy." It sure promises a lot, but I've heard nothing but complaints from people who've tried to use it (I, fortunately, haven't had to). Other implementations of UNIX have a perfectly reasonable analog to tb, called core files and one of a number of debuggers, including adb, sdb and dbx. Of course, these don't work under SR9.2.3. I can't fault the compiler error messages other than for their parsing difficulty (remember, I prefer to use the Emacs next-error function to automatically open and position at the errors). The slur about conventions is just that. There are many conventions within the UNIX domain, from the definition of regular expressions to the "small is beautiful" philosophy of UNIX tools. I have barely used DSEE. I know a number of people who swear by it. I know a number of managers who swear they have save man months by using DSEE. There is even a case of a programmer who refused to use DSEE and lost a month of time merging his code into the project code. For a small project DSEE is not very useful; it is more work than it is worth. For large projects, though, it is quite valuable. The unix equivalent to tb is addressed, what of the rest? One has to get their core dumped first. What if it does not? tb always works. It seems to me that your are calling emacs part of unix. This does not seem quite fair. It is a tool that runs on top of UNIX. It can run on top of Aegis also. All one has to do us look back through about the last 25 messages of this news group to see the difference in conventions. The UNIX kernel is great. As soon as you leave the kernel, you are on real shaky ground. What's missing? Is it tb (whose equivalent functionality Apollo defeated by not initially providing core files and adb)? The unspoken comment here is that you run csh by default. Why not /com/sh? Others have suggested that UNIX is obsolete by AEGIS standards, but here we have an AEGIS advocate who requires UNIX tools, down to the default command processor. From a terminal, I use mostly csh. From the DM, I use mostly /com/sh. The /com/sh was not made to work from a terminal; csh was. It seems to me that it is more that some people are very used to the UNIX way of doing things. Learning a new way, would take a very long time. In some cases one can't do in Aegis what one can do in unix. In other cases one cannot do in any unix what one can do in aegis. I believe that unix is moving towards aegis in most ways. In the mean time, it is very important that one can run unix tools on aegis so that aegis can take advantage of work done on unix. It is mostly the tools which unix has which make it loved by many.