csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) (05/19/88)
In article <23121@pyramid.pyramid.com>, I said: >If it's any consolation, Sun is switching to BNU (aka HoneyDanBer) in SunOS >4.0. So you can all stop groaning and moaning about Sun's UUCP.... In article <127@ists> mike@ists (Mike Clarkson) writes: >My understanding is that the new UUCP will not be in 4.0, but is planned for >4.1. Mea Culpa! I misunderstood Bill Shannon's note. Yes, it will not be in 4.0. Bill is working on the BNU port now, and he's going to do it *right*. As it comes right off the tape, SVR3 BNU is lacking a few important features, and has some appalling bugs. (You can tell at a glance which code was from the original HDB, and which was hacked in later. Love 'em or damn 'em, but Peter, Dave, and Brian write beautiful code.) >I heard once that Rick Salz... Try Rick Adams. C'mon folks, Ric_k Adams, Ric_h Salz. They're not inter- changable. :-) >... gave them a fully ported 4.3 UUCP a long time ago but that they didn't do >anything with it. Plain ol' 4.3BSD UUCP runs just dandy on SunOS 3.x; seismo is a Sun 3/180, remember. So if you've got the source license, go for it. Make sure you have all of Rick's latest fixes. What you fail to understand is that a computer vendor cannot take a 500K hunk of source code -- no matter how well it works -- and simply drop it into their release. It took me three months to add 4.3BSD UUCP to Pyramid's OSx, excluding local enhancements. That included: - Learning the new code. If I don't understand it, I'm not shipping it; I don't care who ported or how much I respect them. As a *vendor*, I cannot trust anyone else to support my machine. Vendors cannot supply software they cannot support. - Querying sample customers. We had to determine how much it would disrupt existing customer's operations to drop a radically new UUCP on them. (As it happens, I did a less than adaquate job, and got some rude flames as a con- sequence.) - Beta testing, and fixing bugs. Nothing's perfect, and I have an obligation to the customers to make sure the software works. - Writing the release notes. Lots of changes between the old and new versions. A README file in the source directory will not do. - Training field service, and providing materials to the education department. This included preparing a course on UUCP adminstration, making lecture notes and transparencies, and lecturing to a VCR so we could distribute tapes to the field offices. We got a lot of calls about UUCP. The people who answer the phones have to be able to answer the questions. - Man pages. (At the time, the 4.3BSD UUCP man pages hadn't been written.) - Administrator's manual. I wasn't happy with the 4.3BSD SMM:9, so I rewrote it. Sun probably wouldn't like my document either (it doesn't fit their for- mat, and I'm not exactly a professional writer), so they'd have to rewrite it again. Sure, Sun had a working 4.3BSD that they did nothing with. In their place, I would have done the same thing. Sun's management decided that there were a lot more important things to do than supporting a new UUCP -- only a tiny fraction of their installed base uses it. Pyramid, on the other hand, sells to a diff- erent customer base, one for whom UUCP was much more important; so we took the necessary time. <csg>