ARPAVAX:mo (10/08/82)
****************************************************************** For research use only - Any reproduction or redistribution of these comments requires explicit permission of the author, and such permission is NOT implied by this notice. ****************************************************************** The following is personal opinion, and in no way reflects any official view by anyone, anywhere. Over the past several weeks, I have been using Dave Kashtan's Eunice development machine, evaluating the latest version of Eunice. I must say at the outset that I am quite favorably impressed. My biggest problems with older versions of Eunice were lack of filename mapping and robustness. Both of these concerns have been addressed in quite satisfactory ways. The new filename mapping code seems to work quite well and is extremely bullet-proof. Some premeditated attempts to fool it were handled properly and as the ultimate test, Dave is running UUCP without hacking filenames! (An acid test if there ever was one.) The mapping code handles arbitrary Unix names, complete with embedded blanks, control characters, and names like "aA_.aA_.aA_." without any loss of information. As for the robustness issue, it has been rendered moot. Most of Eunice is now implemented in C and at no time did Eunice do something that you have to know VMS to understand. As with any piece of software, there are probably a few rough edges hidden in obscure places, but none of them snagged me. (An aside: Dave has developed programming schemes for interfacing with VMS facilities from C in clean and simple ways. This could be of great benefit to sites doing VMS-specific programming in C.) As for 4.1BSD-specific facilities, the new version supports the "job control" facilities, which make life much simpler. They seem to be robust and work well. I have only one complaint about the version of Eunice I have been using - "stty erase ^H" doesn't work, but that is something Dave can't really do anything about. Until DEC decides users deserve a choice of control characters, I don't know what can be done easily. (But finger-macros from years of Unix use just don't switch off instantly.) All in all, using Dave's new system was a pleasant experience. As I said before, there are probably rough edges which will appear only after heavy use by many Unix users, but Eunice appears to be a useful, viable product which should be considered as one of several possibilities by organizations looking for VMS productivity tools. -Mike