NAIVE EUNICE INFO REQUEST

[Chip Rosenthal]

>  = gordon at cae780.UUCP (Brian Gordon)
>> = article <281 at calmasd.UUCP> jpm at calmasd.UUCP (John McNally)

Unfortunately, the original message didn't make it here.  Here is
my $0.02 worth...

>>2.  Just what does it emulate?  
> When all goes well, it emulates a 4.1 UNIX environment - sh, csh, cc,

There are a couple things which are either missing or not well
supported.  The 'missing' program which I find a pain is 'cron'.
Although I've heard rumor of people porting cron to Eunice painlessly,
TWG distributes the following as cron:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                      |
|      echo cron is not implemented.                                   |
|                                                                      |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

No joke...that is the contents of /etc/cron.  Yes, you can implement
scheduling with VMS batch jobs, but somehow I find having a single crontab
much more appealing than zillions of /AFTER= jobs.

An example of a poorly supported program is, unfortunately, UUCP.  Yes
it is there and it runs, but we had to create some mother .COM files to
get UUCP to do anything near what we want.

>>4.  What versions of VMS does it require/desire?
> I have used it under VMS 3.5/6/7/8 (yes, there IS TOO a 3.8), and have
> heard from reliable sources that a 4.0 version will be available soon.

I also hear rumors of a BSD4.2 version.

>>5.  Is it worth bothering with?
> A non-trivial question, depending in part on exactly what you want to do
> with it.

Brian's answer is an excellent one.  In general, if you don't need
Eunice, don't buy it.  But, Eunice has been extremely successful for
us.  We need to run a lot of software which requires a VMS
environment.  We were willing to make some sacrifices which Eunice
implies in order to get a Unix environment and Unix utilities.  (The
utilities are key!  If all I wanted was a shell I could buy that from
DEC.)  What are those sacrifices?  Performance is one (e.g. stats are
slow).  Occasional wierd flakies is another (anybody remember the 'vi'
dies bug?).  Sure, Eunice has problems and I can't make an unreserved
recommendation.  However, I don't really have any qualms over the
decision to run it on our machines--it has worked out well.

-- 

Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara
{cbosgd,idi,intelca,icalqa,kremvax,qubix,ucscc} ! {t4test,t12tst} ! {chip,news}