[ On Friday, April 6, 2001 at 12:32:30 (-0700), Charles M. Hannum wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: what i see ;) port-s390
>
> It's not just the `hype'.  AIX is a baroque pile of wombat barf.  (And
> this is from someone who used AIX for years.)  Also, AIX/370 is really
> not at all the same as RS/6000 AIX (or at least it wasn't when I last
> used it).

In theory they've got the same AIX release across all their platforms,
unlike in the late 1980s when there was a different variant for each
architecture and they were done by at least two or three different
software houses on behalf of IBM.  Oddly it was the i386 and 370
versions that were most closely related.

One good thing about AIX is that if it's your sole programming
environment then it's kind of like a dream world.  Absolutely any
unix-related API is available and "just works"!  It's probably the
easiest plaform I've ever ported large system applications to.  On the
other hand that kind of environment drives tools like autconf to the nut
house.

AIX is an absolute nightmare to administer, though it does have some
cool tools that make some parts of the job infinitely easier at the same
time (eg. the logical volume manager).

It's not (well, wasn't in 4.1.x) as well documented as even NetBSD
though.  They've got lots of docs, in a hypertext environment, but it
has a very steep learning curve and it's nowhere easy enough to search
for things (they've never heard of a permuted index, for example).

If anyone wants to park a small s/390 in my basement (and help with the
power bill) I'll happily help work on porting NetBSD to it though!  :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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