alliot@tdv.cenatls.cena.dgac.fr (Jean-Marc Alliot) (06/28/91)
(The README describing PARADISE is included at the end of this article for people who don't know what PARADISE is). There are good and bad news about PARADISE. First, bad news: I have not a lot of time right now, and can only do minimal support for paradise. But I think that users can help each others. So I decided to create a mailing list. To suscribe, send a mail to paradise@enac.dgac.fr with a subject containing the word "suscribe" All contributions will be sent at the same address. I will start posting info in this mailing list next week; this way, I won't have to answer twice (or more) to the same questions, and every PARADISE user will be able to query the community for solutions Good news: 1) Gerard Padiou (ENSEIHT) and Stephane Bortzmeyer (CNAM) succeeded in porting PARADISE for the Sony/RISC workstations, but the patches they sent me are not identical, and I have to make a standard distribution before releasing them. I hope patches will be ready next week. 2) The first official patch for PARADISE is available. It is available by ftp (143.196.3.5) as pub/patch01.paradise. You can also retrieve it via the mail server. It seems that this small patch solves some serious problems, especially on SONY. 3) A port for the APOLLO is on the run. I want to thank all people who helped me in the last weeks and especially Stephane Bortzmeyer, Gerard Padiou and Cyrille Comar. We would like to hear about people who tried to port PARADISE to other workstations. The mailing list is now ready for them. pub/README.paradise: PARADISE Packages for Asynchronous Real-time Ada Drivers for Interconnected Systems Exchange This set of packages has been developped to implement inter-processes, inter tasks and inter-machines communication for ADA programs in the UNIX (BSD and System V) world. These packages give the user full access to files, pipes, sockets (both UNIX and Internet), and pseudo-devices. They also implement useful operation such as FORK or EXEC. All objects are implemented as ADA types, along with all notions that we thought could be useful (Internet adresses, subnet adresses,...) MORE IMPORTANT : blocking IO are no longer blocking the whole UNIX process , but are now just blocking the task requesting data-transfer. These packages are 9000 lines long. The distribution includes a complete manual. It contains a short introduction to PARADISE and to the basic mechanisms of communication in UNIX, a description of each important function of PARADISE, and some useful examples demonstrating how PARADISE can be used in a multi-tasking world to communicate with pipes, pseudo-devices, UNIX and INTERNET sockets between tasks, processes and machines. These packages have been developped for the Alsys ADA compiler, and the SUN/OS operating systems, but we think that only minimal modifications are required to compile and run with other compilers or other UNIX/OS. We are very interested in experiments on other machines. If you succeed in porting PARADISE, please tell us. We will try to maintain PARADISE as much as we can, and to provide minimal user support. Contacts: Francis Preux (preux@cenatls.cena.dgac.fr) Jean-Marc Alliot (alliot@cenatls.cena.dgac.fr) Note: these packages are released under the GPL, because it was easier for us. We are ready to discuss the possibility of releasing new versions of PARADISE under an other kind of license. PARADISE is available by anonymous ftp on enac5.enac.dgac.fr (143.196.3.5), file pub/paradise.tar.Z. You can also get them via our mail server. Send a mail to mserver@enac.dgac.fr with a body containing: send-me pub/paradise.tar.Z A patch is also available (pub/patch01.paradise).