Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pacbell!rtech!gonzo!daveb
From: daveb@gonzo.UUCP (Dave Brower)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Software Maintenance for the UNIX Operating System
Message-ID: <484@gonzo.UUCP>
Date: 14 Dec 88 07:41:35 GMT
References: <21896@apple.Apple.COM> <293@pitstop.UUCP> <6042@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: daveb@gonzo.UUCP (Dave Brower)
Organization: Gonzo Media Group
Lines: 29

In article <6042@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>Sun sells a product called "NSE" which was designed to solve this kind
>of "programming in the large" problem.  I think the SunOS 4.0 release
>was not built with it (not quite ready/stable yet) but the upcoming
>4.1 is being built with it (though I could be wrong).
>
>I thought I remembered a Usenix paper about it, but I've looked through
>1986-88 and didn't find it.  Can someone from Sun who knows about this
>post a summary of it?  My impression was that it was a neat system that
>has never received the emphasis or publicity that it deserves.

Both Sun's NSE and Apollo's DSEE look like perfectly wonderful products,
suffers the same fatal flaw to different degrees.  Both are proprietary
solutions that aren't of much practical interest to people doing
heterogenous development.  Flexibility and hardware independance are the
driving forces within the UNIX community.  Therefore, it is more than a
little problem in getting a large organization, which would benefit most
from the methodology, to adopt a product that only runs on one brand of
box.  Perhaps when NSE is running on top of OpenLook, and licensed for
use on other hardware...  but I won't hold my breath.  

The market is really waiting for a third party equivalent that will run
on a range of machines, supporting one of the emerging windowing
standards. Is anybody working on this?

-dB
-- 
If life was like the movies, the music would match the picture.

{sun,mtxinu,hoptoad}!rtech!gonzo!daveb		daveb@gonzo.uucp