ucbvax:ARPAVAX:mo@sri-unix (09/05/82)
Lest someone get the wrong idea, I do wish Wollongong well with their attempt to support Eunice; I am afraid they will need more than my best wishes, however. I do suggest that before anyone decide, to purchase anything like Eunice they examine the competing product from Human Computing Resources in Toronto. -Mike
ARPAVAX:mo (09/05/82)
Re: Wollongon and Eunice I will attempt to give a balanced review of Eunice and our experience with it. In previous messages I stooped to hyperbole and I am sorry if anyone feels injured. Our experience with Eunice goes back before the current version and my gut-reactions are colored by that. The early version was was written mostly in MACRO-32, not very solid and we worked very hard to make it work. The latest version of Eunice, which seems to be mostly in C, seems to work pretty well as far as it goes. Eunice has a specific set of "design goals" which is how it differs from other products like HCR's Unity. Eunice attempts to make Unix tools available for VMS programmers, and to that end, it does pretty well, but at no time would you be unaware that VMS is down there at the bottom. (This is not a value judgement, just a statement.) For the people on our VMS machines, having "vi" and some of the other tools (such as UUCP) has been a real savior. So in fairness, it does work, routinely and gets a pretty good workout. But it wasn't without considerable work on our part to make it go. Most of that work has been fed back to the developers, so it /should/ benefit from it (I don't know for sure what they do with it!). On the minus side, the version we have (which may NOT be the version Wollongong is going to support) isn't a complete emulation of Unix. There are several subtlies in Unix sematics that are very hard to do, given the way VMS does things. Whereever possible, Eunice tries to use a VMS facility to do a job. This is another difference between Eunice and Unity. This causes VMS filename restrictions to show up in Unix programs, as an example. Converting UUCP had some real surprises!! (VMS just loved L.sys!). The other problem with Eunice is that is has several components which require the VMS equivalent of Superuser to function. This isn't particularly a problem if the installation is supported by the people who own the machine, but there are some significant opportunities for security problems. Not that Eunice is inherently insecure, but that it does require a lot of priviledge to operate, and it hasn't been "bullet-proofed" to my knowledge. So, Eunice is fairly reasonable, but not perfect (but what software is!). When evaluating Eunice versus Unity, the big issue is what is the environment and what is the goal. If you don't mind having to hack on your system a bit, and the goal is to improve the lot of VMS users, Eunice will probably do pretty well. If your goal is to support people in a very complete Unix environment, or are simply a user on some VMS machine administered by some remote authority (who isn't about to let you install code which requires SETPRIV), the Unity appears to be the better choice. Note this is not an endorsement of either product, but there is a lot of discussion about this topic, and I hope this comparison help. They do have different goals, and there are good arguments for the different orientations. As for Wollongong and supporting Eunice, it is a large undertaking, and I suspect they will spend quite a bit of effort getting Eunice polished and packaged for non-expert customers. I wish them well and hope they do well. There still aren't that many Unix-oriented companies around. -Mike