guy@uunet.uu.net (Guy Harris) (06/16/90)
>| The $2000 sounds like it probably includes the Transcript license, >| although I hear its a bitch to run under SysV machines, which SunOS4.1 is. >| I know it sounds pretty outragous, but it might be worth it. Just >| remember, SunOS 4.1 is a SysV offshoot rather than a BSD offshoot. Sigh. Apparently Sun's marketing blurb seems to be confusing a lot of people. SunOS 4.1 is basically no more an S5 offshoot than SunOS 4.0. It has an S5 command environment, just as 4.0 (and other SunOS releases back to 3.2) have, which you get at by putting "/usr/5bin" in your path before "/bin" and "/usr/bin" (although in 4.x you might as well just leave "/bin" out of your path, it's a symlink to "/usr/bin"). It has an S5 compile environment which you get at if you run "/usr/5bin/cc", just as 4.0 (and other releases back to 3.2) have. The S5 environment in 4.1 is more complete than in previous releases; the intent, as of when I was at Sun, was to run it through the SVVS and officially say "it meets the SVID, Issue 2", although I don't know if Sun's officially done that. A few more bits of the system are S5-derived than were before, such as the accounting software and the UUCP. In addition, since a number of SunOS-isms (whether from Sun, or from BSD) have made it into S5R4, and since the S5R4 dynamic linking mechanism is derived from the SunOS 4.x one, and since the SunOS 4.1 and S5R4 programmatic interface to the dynamic linker were made compatible, you can think of the S5 environment in 4.1 as being somewhat similar to a subset of S5R4. (It's *not* identical - for one thing, the pseudo-tty mechanism is different.) However, the kernel still has pretty much the same balance of S5, BSD, and Sun code in it that 4.0 did, as do the libraries and commands - including the line printer spooler, which is the part most relevant to Transcript, I suspect. It *does* have S5-style "lp" *user* commands, but they talk to the same BSD-derived spooler that the BSD "lpr" command and company do. In addition, 4.1 does *not* use COFF, as I infer some people thought it did from their postings, and the "default" environment you get if you don't have "/usr/5bin" in your path is still the BSD one.