netinfo@GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU (Postmaster & BITINFO) (02/04/88)
In reply to:
From peter@vuwisor.vuw.ac.nz Tue Feb 2 11:13:41 1988
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Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1988 18:01:09 NDT
From: peter@vuwisor.vuw.ac.nz
To: postmaster@violet
Subject: Refer enquiry
Cc: peter@comp.vuw.ac.nz
It would be appreciated if the following message could be passed
on to Bill Tuthill (Computing Services, Univ. California, Berkeley)
or to any of the co-developers of the Unix bibliography system Refer.
Thank you for your assistance.
I have not been able to contact Bill Tuthill on the phone to ask
him what he wrote. (He now works at Sun Microsystems).
If I remember correctly, "refer" and "lookbib" was developped
by Bell Labs (they are in Unix version 7) and the rest
(eg. addbib, sortbib, etc.) was written at Berkeley.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
We wish to transfer Refer from a Pyramid (with System 4.2) to an
AT&T 3B2/400B (with System 5).
I have been told that "refer" program is part of Unix System V
release 2. So you should not have to transfer that.
The Berkeley part is distributed as part of BSD Unix.
However you may want to consider upgrading to "BibIX" which is
a replacement for "refer" from the University of California at
San Francisico. BibIX is derived from an earlier package called
"bib", created by Timothy A. Budd and Gary M. Levin at the
University of Arizona. Along with BibIX you will also need addbib
and sortbib from BSD Unix. BibIX is currently packaged for
BSD Unix sites and does not include addbib and sortbib. I ask
if those two problems can be added to the BibIX package distribution
tape.
Information about licensing of BSD Unix and BibIX (and licensing fees)
is available from:
Campus Software Office
295 Evans Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
(415) 643-7201
cld-cso@cmsa.berkeley.edu
Send them your postal address and ask for BSD Unix and BibIX
information.
We would be grateful for any useful
tips that you can give us. In particular:
Are there any major snags or pitfalls that we need to be aware of?
I have been told there are difference between the BSD Unix and System V
Unix C libraries. The folks on the USENET news group "comp.lang.c"
(Internet mailing list info-c@brl.arpa) should be able to answer
questions about C programming differences under BSD Unix and
System V Unix.
How efficient is Refer with reasonably large databases (say 10000 to
20000 records)?
I have never benchmarked it. AT&T or folks on USENET news group
"comp.text" maybe able to answer that.
(Any e-mail should be sent to peter@vuwisor.vuw.ac.nz via uunet.)
Many thanks
Peter Thomson (Victoria University, New Zealand)
Bill Wells
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| William Wells (COML: 1-415-642-9801, ATSS: 582-9801) |
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------------------------------------------------------------------------tut%cairo@Sun.COM (Bill Tuthill) (02/05/88)
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
hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George Hartzell) (02/05/88)
In article <41055@sun.uucp> tut%cairo@Sun.COM (Bill Tuthill) writes: > >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. I don't remember reading the original article, so I don't know how deeply entrenched in troff you are, but there is a freely available system for TeX, called tib, that seems very powerful. It is a pre-processor modeled after bib. It is available on the Unix-tex distribution tape from the University of Washington. George Hartzell (303) 492-4535 MCD Biology, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309 hartzell@Boulder.Colorado.EDU ..!{hao,nbires}!boulder!hartzell
carvalho@garnet.berkeley.edu (Marcio de Carvalho) (02/06/88)
There is an enhanced version of "bib" called BibIX that uses refer's data bases. It is distributed by UC Berkeley through the Campus Software Office. On the same subject, there's a paper titled "Maintaining Cross References in Manuscripts" by Alfred Aho and Ravi Sethi. It appeared in "Software-Practice and Expirience, vol 18, January 1988, pp 1-13. It shows how to deal with references in manuscripts by using UNIX tools ( awk, sed ), independent of the text formatter.
Beebe@SCIENCE (Nelson H.F. Beebe) (02/10/88)
X-Us-Mail: "Center for Scientific Computing, South Physics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112" X-Telephone: (801) 581-5254 There is now a significant extension of bib called Bibix; it will be distributed under the terms of the BSD license. For details, send mail to its developer, Dr. R.P.C. Rodgers (rodgers@boltzmann.ucsf.edu). -------