FW: OT: broken/useless ansi - console driver??

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Esak" <john at valar.com>
To: "Fplist (E-mail)" <filepro-list at seaslug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 3:33 PM
Subject: RE: FW: OT: broken/useless ansi - console driver??


> You all got a mistaken impression. Dave is/was not talking about his 
> install
> programs, maybe I brought that in. He is working on coding an app... it 
> has
> to be recompiled and tried again. Instead of being able to just copy the 
> new
> binaries and everything over from his workspace to the testing machine...
> and getting an error about text file busy because one of the many clients 
> he
> has working, perhaps a desktop, perhaps a laptop somewhere, perhaps 
> several
> alternate logins, etc., it now just happily copies the binary and the
> working clients crash out. What was simple before, now becomes a 
> hassle....
> different... whatever you want to say. I am the one who thinks it is
> wrong/stupid behavior. The only thing that should happen when you try
> writing to a running binary is: you get an error.  What the benefits of it
> working any other way are unknown to me, and as far as I'm concerned
> unimportant....  If this was going to be Unixware 9 or 10 or whatever, 
> then
> fine... but it is OpenServer 6!!  What I think the "new" SCO did in their
> infinite wisdom is realize that their huge (by far) client base was using
> OpenServer... so, they simply put out their next Unixware version under 
> that
> name... breaking everything without care or regard in the hopes that the
> faster file system would appease everyone. Not me. It's kind of a bait and
> switch to do these kinds of *major* changes without ANY indication that 
> they
> are there.
>
> Sorry, just MHO again.
>
> John
>
> P.S. - A dead simple and very close analogy would be if filePro's next
> version just blithely overwrote locked records with new data... would
> everyone say... oh, that's just the new Unixware way of things, get used 
> to
> it. Ridiculous.

I completely, completely, so completely agree.
The topic has arisen already on comp.unix.sco.misc and when I expressed 
approximately this view sco's response was to ask what specifically is 
broken in the new version.
I didn't even aswer because its such an idioticaly small question about such 
a large and sweeping topic. Where to begin? Maybe nothings wrong. The point 
is no one knows yet because osr6 is neither the next incimental version of 
Unixware, nor the next incrimental version of OSR5. In-house at SCO, they 
called it FrankenServer when they first started testing the concept of 
putting the Unixware kernel into the OSR5 userland. And why should I waste 
all month doing the research to put together the answer?
I have other things to do. I have a system that I already know works and can 
be trustd to always do the same thing and has been used and tested already 
in all the contexts I need to use it in, inconcert with all the hardware and 
software I need to use it with. I don't know al the million problems that 
will turn up in osr6 when you try to treat it as a drop-in replacement for 
osr5, but I know there will be many, and discussions like this are exactly 
exactly exactly what I knew would happen.

That's all a normal part of progress and that's fine. That's what beta 
testers are for. That's what giving it away free to home/school/personal 
users is for. Let those who want to play with something new and risky do so. 
Do not force that unstable environment on those who pay a lot specifically 
to avoid that. ESPECIALLY don't let them pay to avoid it, and then give it 
to them anyways!
If modern & fast & powerful & risky is OK, then we can all get that for free 
already.

This all arose when SCO announced on comp.unix.sco.misc that they are 
discontinuing all sales and support of 5.0.6, and the way they worded it at 
first, it looked like you wouldn't even be able to buy additional users or 
cpus. 5.0.7 users and cpus do not work on 5.0.6 and earlier, so starting in 
a couple months, a 5.0.6 user would have to replace their OS just to add a 
single new employee. Which I find exceptionally offensive. It also sounded 
like 5.0.7 was not far behind although they didn't specifically say so. 
After much outrage, they posted that you could still buy user/cpu add-ons 
for 5.0.6 but the part numbers wouldn't appear in any catalogs or price 
lists. So lucky me, I will just happen to know that I can call up and order 
them outside of normal channels, but a normal person looking at a catalog 
would not know that. How many will they trick into wasting thousands of 
dollars on software and consultants fees this way?

Giving me this untested thing and saying "Oh well if there's a problem just 
tell us what it is." is NOT acceptable.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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