Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!cairo!tut
From: tut%cairo@Sun.COM (Bill Tuthill)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Porting refer and related programs
Message-ID: <41055@sun.uucp>
Date: 4 Feb 88 21:25:21 GMT
References: <8802040558.AA21318@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
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There shouldn't be major problems porting the refer software to a 3B2
running System V.  The only problem would be gaining access to source
code if you don't have a source license.  As far as I know, troff isn't
part of System V any longer, and without troff, refer would be useless,
although the indexing software would still be useful.  AT&T does sell
troff separately as part of Documenter's WorkBench (DWB), which doesn't
include refer.

From what I've heard, bib is better than refer.  I can't say, having
never used bib.  I haven't worked on bibliographies since I left UCB.

The main problem with refer is that you have to modify troff macros
if you want to create different styles of citations and bibliographies.
Troff macros aren't easy to modify.

According to the paper "Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the
UNIX System," published as part of the V7 manual, searching a database
of 152,000,000 bytes took 1.7 seconds of CPU time (perhaps on a PDP/11).
That sounds like good performance, and my experience confirms this.

Many commercial database systems offer no support, or poor support, for
variable-length records such as natural-language text.  One system that
did-- Sequitur-- was a commercial failure.  By contrast, the indexing
software that comes with refer does a fine job of supporting quick access
to variable-length records.  It's amazing what UNIX gives you for free.

Bill Tuthill