From: Digestifier To: Linux-Development@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Reply-To: Linux-Development@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Date: Mon, 29 Nov 93 03:13:09 EST Subject: Linux-Development Digest #268 Linux-Development Digest #268, Volume #1 Mon, 29 Nov 93 03:13:09 EST Contents: Re: Free Software and Motif (was: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw:...) (David Brooks) Re: Comments from the "TAMU Crap" author (Rob Malouf) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Creeping featuritis (post --rant --flame) (Elizabeth Haley) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Found slow socket bug :) (Linus Torvalds) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Charles Henrich) Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! (Anthony A. Datri) Re: Free Software and Motif (was: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw:...) (Steven Whitlatch) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Free Software and Motif (was: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw:...) Date: 29 Nov 1993 04:29:17 GMT Reply-To: dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) john@hopf.math.nwu.edu (John Franks) writes: > >If this account is accurate it is very disturbing. It says that NCSA >is not complying with their license when they distribute Xmosaic >statically linked binaries without a notice that users are required to >have a Motif license. Groan. I thought it was already apparent from this thread that the people at NCSA know what they are doing. How do they manage that? Because, instead of trying to gain all wisdom on the net, they actually contacted OSF and asked questions. You know the technique: want the answer to a question -> ask. Not speculate. The license is a contractual document. It's not particularly complex, as such documents go, but interpreting it isn't in my sphere of expertise. If you have a question about it, we recommend the following steps: 1. Obtain one. Read it. 2. Formulate specific questions. Call OSF. What's particularly frustrating is that Marc and Eric actually took care to abide by the license, and it's they who are being unjustly charged with non-compliance. Anything you get from them is legal. Having said all that, our business management people have (as you know by now) prepared an accessible summary of the license. I'm sorry it has taken so long; it is not easy to produce an accurate summary at the speed demanded by the net (this whole thing started on November 17). But it will appear on the cited newsgroups Monday. Remember, if you read the summary and still have questions, please, please follow steps 1 and 2 above. This is my first posting in this thread, and I hope my last. -- David Brooks, Open Software Foundation dbrooks@osf.org ------------------------------ From: malouf@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rob Malouf) Subject: Re: Comments from the "TAMU Crap" author Date: Mon, 29 Nov 93 06:12:55 GMT In article dwex@aib.com (David E. Wexelblat) writes: >IF we picked a specific set of supported boards and supported monitors, >then we could do things trivially by table look up. But you folks >want us to support everything known to mankind. The generic problem >is hard, perhaps impossible, to solve. > >Don't ever think there is any correlation between a BIOS or a Windows >driver and what we have to do for XFree86. The folks who write the >BIOS or write the Window driver: > > a) Only have to worry about one board. > b) Know EVERYTHING there is to know about that one board. Why not take advantage of this info? Since I don't have a manual for my monitor, I used the tseng3.exe program distributed with SVGAlib to get the register settings used by the drivers that came with my video card. Then, I configured SVGAlib to use those register settings and used a modified version of vgaset to give me the timing values for each SVGAlib mode. Voila! I was finally able to get 1024x768 to work in non-interlaced mode. This method probably won't work for anything fancier than an ET4000-based card, but then people with fancier equipment probably have manuals too. Rob Malouf malouf@csli.stanford.edu ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:15:42 GMT >>Read my lips: binaries -- especially statically-linked ones -- don't cut it. >Have you told that to your commercial vendors? Yes. >think they "cut it". My copy of FrameMaker is a tidy 4.6 megs, >megs, and it's statically linked. These apps "cut it" every day for >us, and I'm sure they cut it for Frame and Delta's other customers >too. You clearly don't have writers stuck with diskless 8-meg 3/60's. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:54:51 GMT >Yeah, right. That's great for those of us with the skill and time to >do this. It varies. Some things are easy (making xterm build under HPUX), and some things are very, very difficult (getting ATK to build under HPUX). >I just love getting new releases of emacs and debugging it >(again) on three platforms. Makes my day. I do have to wonder if the FSF so much as links and runs gnumacs 19 before releasing it. >Like it or not, you are in the minority. Now that Motif is going to >be bundled with all COSE platforms in the near future If COSE ever actually exists, watch it be an expensive bundled product. >choose. Personally, I would rather spend $400 to buy Motif On each of hundreds of machines, *every* time a new release comes out? -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:38:16 GMT >|>Huh? How can Mosaic's functionality *possibly* depend on pseudo-3D art-deco >|>borders around everything? >Because it uses the common library of World Wide Web code. This contains >routines that resolve anchors, access servers, parse SGML etc. None of which has anything to do with the Motif toolkit. >I can understand the people who don't want to pay for software. I don't resent paying for software, but I *do* resent paying outrageous amounts of money for software. It costs *thousands* to get Motif sources, and *thousands* to keep up-to-date with them. It also costs hundreds to buy someone's pre-built stuff, which always has stupidity hardwired into it, like expecting to live in /usr/lib/X11. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Creeping featuritis (post --rant --flame) From: haley@scws6.harvard.edu (Elizabeth Haley) Date: 29 Nov 93 05:38:46 GMT bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) writes: >Programs like tar might incorporate a mechanism to run the filter themselves >(compare the "z" option to GNU tar for compression). The difference being >that the filter is still an outside program; you don't need to duplicate the >code for GNU cpio or dd or for some other program, and you can upgrade the >filter without having to upgrade cpio, tar, dd, etc. You'll at least have to add a flag to the header of the file, which means changing the format of any storage program, which might be o.k. for cpio and tar, but maybe not dd. I do like the idea of the filter being separate, but they would need to be released as a suite, so people understand that tar, etc. are different. >Small files, maybe... but in that case I want it uninterpreted anyway. For >indeterminate format files I *do* use paginators... because random binary >characters can screw up your terminal (or xterm) rather effectively. Personal choice. I'd stick that one up to a poll. >Not so far as I know. The point is to plug in a RAID array in place of an >external disk, and let the array's firmware do the work. Ahhh. I thought perhaps a cool controller would send a specific failure message to the console, along with its happy little buzzer. >I have my doubts... "real-time" implies that the task talking to e.g. the A/D >converter can do so uninterrupted. Which means you've shut down every other >task on the system... and a lot more things are tasks in a microkernel than in >a monolithic system. If what it's trying to do is capture data at high speed >and write it to disk, it's got a major problem if the disk driver and/or >filesystem are separate tasks which are blocked by the higher-priority real- >time task. I have seen a few A/D board that had large caches, specifically so you can just dump it once and a while, as cpu time permits. Then it's just a matter of making sure the dumps are atomic, so you can stop slowing down the card. The card itself would apparently switch to another bank, or maybe do a trailing edge write vs. a leading edge dump. In either case, not having continuous access can be dealt with. However, having more direct access to the card can mean smaller caches needed, thus reducing cost, and maybe larger dumps because of less overhead. -- Hacksaw ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 06:03:46 GMT >CDE will probably be optional the first year or so. But once it has >stabilized, it's a no-win to have two lines of development: one for >CDE and one for . Tell that to Frame, which apparently maintains disjoint source trees for the various platforms. Heck, they just came out with an xnews-dependent version that effectively end-of-life'd already. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:57:59 GMT >Isn't it ironic that prices of the OS are dropping That's news to me, although it's certainly true that the completeness of the OS is dropping as more and more stuff gets unbundled. >For large institutions and companies, who used to be the traditional >users of Unix/X11, this $400 doesn't make much difference; $400 isn't a one-time charge. You end up having to pay for expensive "maintenance" to ever get an update. >but for the >mass market for personal use it does. If you want to see MS-DOS etc. >replaced by an open operating system then a (commercial) Motif cannot >be part of it. Not with current pricing. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:31:47 GMT >So you see, twm does not use Atena Widgets. >The real Problem is _NOT_ using Motif or Xaw. Sigh. IT'S A BLOODY WINDOW MANAGER. Does EVERYTHING have to cover half my display with pseudo-3D art-deco borders? >Motif offers the minimum of a GUI consistence If I *ever* find the guy who introduced this misuse of "GUI" ... >Xaw is small and fast, but there is not a trace of the >consistence, that make a GUI easy to use. How can pseudo-3D art-deco borders around everything POSSIBLY make an application easier to use? A button is a button, regardless of what stupid decorations are around it. In fact, the Motif toolkit can make an application *harder* to use because the stupid borders swell the window size so much that your windows end up obscuring each other more. >Take a look at several Xaw applications. >There is a horrible mix of concepts, how to use these programs. If these programs >have a menu bar, sometimes there are single buttons in it, sometimes there are >pulldown menus. Mechanism, not policy. Write a style guide if you want, but this is in no way an inherent quality of the toolkit. I see motif programs with buttons (ximagemagic) and motif programs with menus (frame). >If you take a look on xfig, you can see an application, which is >not intuitive to use at all. Agreed, although it's a lot better than it used to be. Fault the author, not the tools. >There are no selection tools What's a "selection tool"? >The are e.g. Open Look Application Style Guidelines, that describe the concepts to >follow when building an application. They would appear to state that menu buttons work oppositely from the entire reset of the world, and that applications not have a quit button. >the same on _all_ GUI's including MS-Windows, Macintosh, Openlook and Motif None of those is a GUI because nothing can *be* a GUI. You mention a window system, a window system/OS merge, a specification, and a toolkit + window manager, respectively. >The only think I can hope for is the inclusion of an usable widget set or class library >in a future release of X. Gee, I've gotten lots of work done with Athena & Xt clients for years. Xmeter isn't hampered by not wasting half its area on shading; nor would that shading help xpostit, xcalc, xkal, dclock, xpostage, or xterm. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:48:30 GMT >If Motif is an example of 'commercial quality', I'll take the non- >commercial stuff any day. Motif has lots of bad code and bugs. Like the apparently-undocumented feature of having to define a symbol called STRINGS_ALIGNED to get it to work on Sun 4's. >How about: >"there is a difference between free quality software and commercial stuff" ? I'd say that cost and quality are just plain orthogonal. Strictly speaking, Sun's OpenWindows is commercial, yet lacks the working imake that X11 from MIT gives you for free. Sun's rpc.mountd dumps core if the domainname is null. >I prefer: > - fast response to bug-reports. Which you can get with some free stuff, but certainly not all. I've never had much luck at all with commercial vendors. > - getting my bug fixes back into the master version. >The third point is difficult-to-impossible with commercial software. Unless you're a mega-mega-customer. I've never been one. >With free software, it's *always* possible, and most often very easy. It varies. The authors of gnu emacs and microemacs, for example, are respectively fickle and downright unresponsive. The authors of "pixmap", though, have been responsive to me. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 06:00:59 GMT >A soon to be release derivative of 386bsd will cost $40 for the CDROM >and that includes X,gcc,kernel, tcp/ip,etc.. -- a fully functionable >system but of course is not going to have Motif. >Also Linux has a CDROM distribution -- they are advertising on the >latest issue of Byte and I am pretty sure that it does not have >Motif -- The Linux SLS CDROM distribution is also very low cost. One of things that bothers me about both 386BSD and Linux is that there appear to be a near infinite number of variations, and nobody will so much as explain what "SLS" is supposed to mean. >to provide motif for the masses and that we will most likely have >to either develop a Motif clone I've been hoping for this for years, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm sure that the existence of one would spur the OSF to make incompatible changes more often, like the existence of third-party memory vendors has apparently spurred Sun to make every new machine take unique memory. -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) Subject: Re: Found slow socket bug :) Date: 29 Nov 1993 08:24:00 +0200 In article <2dbag3$bdi@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de>, Kai Petzke wrote: >In entropy@world.std.com (Lawrence Foard) writes: > >>Is verify area used to prevent paging inside of the calls (something >>which would fail for very large writes or reads), or only for checking >>the area? > >I'm not 100% certain, about what is going on, but some facts: > >The kernel should avoid to produce page faults while in kernel >mode. Just think, you were in a routine, all interrupts >disabled, and produce a page fault, so you need to read some >sectors from swap space. What if the disk uses an interrupt >to signal that the data is there? It won't get delivered, >because interrupts are still off. This is one problem, but not the one that 'verify_area()' tries to handle. In order to avoid problems like the above, you simply have to compy the stuff to kernel memory before using it: interrupts and device drivers may never use user-memory directly. >As far, as I know, 386 chips even have problems of reporting >page faults while in kernel mode at all. They don't regard >the write protect bit, for example. But THIS is the problem. The i386 is "broken-by-design" (it's a "feature" in intel-speak), and the verify_area() call is needed to check that any area we are writing to isn't shared with some other process (on a 386 this would otherwise change the memory of the other process as well, as the paging unit doesn't work correctly). >In other words: don't produce page faults in the kernel. Therefore, >verify_area() is called, before any user supplied area is accessed >in the kernel. It swaps in all relevant pages. No, 'verify_area()' doesn't try to swap anything in: it just check the present pages and makes sure they are writable. It also does some very minor range-checking (makes sure that the address given is in the user space area) Note that with the newer ALPHA-kernels, linux checks at startup if the processor can correctly handle the WP bit (you should see a message like "This processor honours the WP bit even while in supervisor mode. Good" at startup). If the processor does this (ie a 486 or newer), most of the verify_area() checks are never done. Linus ------------------------------ From: henrich@rs560.cl.msu.edu (Charles Henrich) Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: 29 Nov 1993 01:34:13 -0500 aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) writes: >>If Motif is an example of 'commercial quality', I'll take the non- >>commercial stuff any day. Motif has lots of bad code and bugs. >Like the apparently-undocumented feature of having to define a symbol called >STRINGS_ALIGNED to get it to work on Sun 4's. After just spending several hours on getting Motif 1.2 to run on a sun386i with SunOs 4.0.2, I'd have to say they did a *DAMN* good job. 99% of the code compiled straight up. And what didnt was covered by define's that were CLEARLY explained in the README file accompanying the distribution. To Everyone: It's getting mighty annoying hearing people whine about "I dont need pretty 3d borders" If that's all you think Motif provides, you certainly need a clue or 42. Motif provides MANY MANY tools and widgets that just arent available under the so called "standard" MIT toolkits. Gimme a break Athena was written expressly as an EXAMPLE toolkit so others would create it. Motif is an *excellent* one. If you dont like it, fine thats your right, but stop bitching because NCSA decided to use it in software that YOU NEED NOT USE! There are 14 Other browsers out there gang, and if they dont suffice right your own damn browser. I applaud the efforts of Eric Bina and Marc Andreeson in producing Mosaic for X, if I had been charged with the same task, I certainly would have chosen Motif as well. I feel much better now, (climbing off the soapbox). -Crh -- Charles Henrich Michigan State University henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu http://rs560.msu.edu/~henrich ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: aad@dvorak.amd.com (Anthony A. Datri) Subject: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw: it now requires runtime royalties! Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:13:50 GMT >library. If Mosaic is your only Motif application Unlikely unless you're surrounded by suntools fans. >Linux, incidentally, initially didn't have dynamic libraries, but had >*shared* libraries. aka HPUX? -- ======================================================================8--< ------------------------------ Crossposted-To: comp.infosystems.www,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.i386unix,comp.windows.x.motif,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d From: swhitlat@nmt.edu (Steven Whitlatch) Subject: Re: Free Software and Motif (was: Re: Don't use Motif for free sw:...) Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 05:32:26 GMT In article <2dbtqt$6pg@paperboy.osf.org> dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) writes: >john@hopf.math.nwu.edu (John Franks) writes: >> >>If this account is accurate it is very disturbing. It says that NCSA >>is not complying with their license when they distribute Xmosaic >>statically linked binaries without a notice that users are required to >>have a Motif license. > >Groan. > >I thought it was already apparent from this thread that the people at NCSA >know what they are doing. Yes, it was explained and easy to understand. Steve Whitlatch swhitlat@prism.nmt.edu -- OK, let's have a look here. Oh my, looks like you've got Mars Mush. Take two T squares and Pluto trine. Then get a lot of Uranus and do whatever you want. ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** The service address, to which questions about the list itself and requests to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, is: Internet: Linux-Development-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux.development) via: Internet: Linux-Development@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites: nic.funet.fi pub/OS/Linux tsx-11.mit.edu pub/linux sunsite.unc.edu pub/Linux End of Linux-Development Digest ******************************