( Citation from article <1992Jan17.182355.21103 at cica.indiana.edu>,
gilbertd at ogre.ogre.cica.indiana.edu (Don Gilbert) )
Recently, Don Gilbert wrote a very objective, comprehensive article on the
usage of Macintoshes in the Unix world , and I agree with nearly everything.
There's just a small BUT there:
> The drawbacks to relying on A/UX as a Unix platform seem to be:
>> (a) It isn't a Sun Sparcstation (this is a drawback for many unix
> platforms :).
...
> to 50 MIPS. These include computers like Sun Sparcstation IPX,
> Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo, and workstations from DEC, HP and
> others.
Without disregarding the success/failure of particular vendors to
contribute enough 'standard' 'posix' or whatever unix, I think that
it is well possible to write software in portable fashion. Just look
at GCG's package which is now available on more or less the same
source code servicing VAX/VMS, DEC/ULTRIX, SUN/SunOS, and SGI/IRIX.
The only problem is usually that the developers of molbio software rarely
have the resources to develop portable code because of
*) lacking hardware (which lab is daring enough to get everything available
on the market?)
*) lacking need (why write a package for a platform which isn't standard
in the particular lab?)
*) lacking experience (which grad student can afford to learn all
peculiarities of a particular window manager or stdio library ? )
Now as the experience shows many don't like to stay with the commercial
packages only and fiddle around with own hacks. What a mess! Besides
the horrible effect that once the student got its PHD and leaves the
lab he/she usually leaves the maintenance of it behind as well (causing
hedaches and sleepless nights for all those who want to do something
with it afterwards), the style of this software is usually very
'spontaneous' (spagetti code, and no conformance to interface design rules,
to name a few).
Therefore I strongly suggest to realize the following:
1) We need an education pathway which gets us a degree in 'biocomputing' so
that the poor chaps doing software development in biology can cite
this as professional experience afterwards.
2) We should use MOTIF as the evolving standard and also less complicated
code for stdio. If you can't make software written for a particular
platform run on others, windowing and io are usually the problem.
3) We should encourage young students to write DOCUMENTATION to their code.
Once you ftp something you usually get what you deserve and this is
not much. Lacking documentation is the reason that ports are
not easy.
4) If you do a port you should be willing to collaborate with the original
author in order to work on the code. The next release whould not
be as specific as the earlier one, and others should not need to
reinvent the wheel.
Regards
Reinhard
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Dr. Reinhard Doelz * EAN doelz at urz.unibas.ch
Biocomputing * DECNET 20579::48130::doelz
Biozentrum der Universitaet * X25 psi%022846211142::embnet
Klingelbergstrasse 70 * FAX x41 61 261- 6760
CH 4056 Basel * TEL x41 61 267- 2076 or 2247
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(I have a variety of UNIX platforms available, and investigated whether
to upgrade my mac or get a workstation. Finally, I got an Indigo SGI for
various reasons and I'm very impressed.)
