Giebelhaus@HI-MULTICS.ARPA.UUCP (05/07/87)
Is it just me, or is the talk which was released with SR9.5 the biggest discrace of a software release Apollo has ever made? 1) I can't get people to use talk to establish a connction to me unless I talk to them first. I assume that is because my name is more than 8 characters long. Please, either support longer names or don't support them. 2) Talk seems to hang people who are logged in over an sio port. When you exit talk, you dead in the water; you never get back to the shell, you never log out, you just sit there until someone does a sigp -s on the process. Come on Apollo, I expect better. I expect this cruddy untested software stuff from other vendors.
scofield@apollo.uucp (Cary Scofield) (05/13/87)
In article <870507021718.495325@HI-MULTICS.ARPA> Giebelhaus@HI-MULTICS.ARPA writes: >Is it just me, or is the talk which was released with SR9.5 the biggest >discrace of a software release Apollo has ever made? > > ... > >Come on Apollo, I expect better. I expect this cruddy untested software >stuff from other vendors. Before you start making absurd comments about other people or organizations, you might want to get some of your information straight: in the first place, "talk" is not supported by Apollo, and as such, Apollo has no obligation to guarantee that it runs correctly with each and every software release. Secondly, given the major software upheaval between sr9.2 and sr9.5 with the goal of maintaining as much upward-compatibility as we possibly could, it's amazing that very few things did break. My suggestion to you is that if really want to use "talk" (I wouldn't know why, given that telephone communications would be much more efficient), you should get a hold of the source and try to fix it yourself.
pato@apollo.UUCP.UUCP (05/13/87)
References: <870507021718.495325@HI-MULTICS.ARPA> <34d5ba17.352b@apollo.uucp> Cc: Bcc: FILE://munin/pato/nfs_mail/cc [ This may be a duplicate submission - sorry ] In article <34d5ba17.352b@apollo.uucp> scofield@apollo.UUCP (Cary Scofield) writes: >... you might want to get some of your information straight: >in the first place, "talk" is not supported by Apollo, and as such, >Apollo has no obligation to guarantee that it runs correctly with >each and every software release. Let me correct some inaccuracies. Cary was confusing an internal program called "talk", which is not supported, with the DOMAIN/IX bsd4.2 talk program. Apollo does ship and support the standard bsd4.2 talk software with sr9.5. Now let me address Tim Giebelhaus' original complaints. > 1) I can't get people to use talk to establish a connction to me unless > I talk to them first. I assume that is because my name is more than 8 > characters long. Please, either support longer names or don't support > them. He is right. We chose to limit usernames to 8 characters in "talk" to conform to the talk protocol. If we had allowed longer names you would not be able to use talk to communicate with users on other vendors' equipment. (You might consider this a little misguided since talk transmits its data structures in native form and therefore can only communicate with machines that have the same data representation. This method also requires that the various compilers layout structures in the same way... However we chose to allow the possibility of interconnection at the expense of users who have longer names.) Had we implemented talk from scratch we would have used NCS which defines heterogeneous protocols, but then, talk would not have been the bsd4.2 version of talk! In the future, it will be easier for a site to force all accounts to conform to pure UNIX properties (i.e., you will be able to prevent usernames from being longer than 8 characters so that all UNIX programs that assume 8 character login names will work). > 2) Talk seems to hang people who are logged in over an sio port. When > you exit talk, you dead in the water; you never get back to the shell, > you never log out, you just sit there until someone does a sigp -s on > the process. Yep, this is true. It is a bug. Please file a UCR. Joe Pato UUCP: ...{attunix,uw-beaver,decvax!wanginst}!apollo!pato Apollo Computer Inc. ARPA: apollo!pato@mit-eddie.arpa -------