At 2002-08-02 03:20 PM, Donna wrote:
>i hate to disagree.....but hp took a lot of time and effort to put posix (to
>float out a boat, using your analogy) on mpe -- and for what??  the adoption
>rate -- of *real* users *really* using anything remotely related to posix --
>(imo) must be less than 10%!  (or certainly some smallish number)        - d

I can't speak for other sites, but here we are using POSIX.  True, we are
using MPE languages (SPLASH! and Business Basic) for most of our
programming, but we are also using not only the HFS (about 83% of the files
on the system are in HFS space) but the POSIX shell and utilities as well
as the common POSIX packages (Apache and Samba, with a touch of Perl and in
the near future, Java).

Yes, the databases are IMAGE (with Jumbo datasets) on a RAID user volume,
but the applications being developed (yes, developed on a "dying" platform)
are hybrid and use both MPE and POSIX.

As in so many things, there is a critical mass that must be reached before
something significant happens.  From my perspective, the POSIX features,
capabilities, utilities, and packages were just reaching the point of that
critical mass when 7.0 was released.  It isn't one big thing that made a
significant impact on the MPE/iX environment, it was a lot of little
things.  Little touches that were missing or incomplete and which limited
the usefulness of POSIX on MPE/iX.  And there is still room for
improvement.  I'd love for GREP to contain several of the features
(options) that are available with GREP on Linux as an example.

A while back I posted questions regarding file access limits.  The answer
proved that MPE exceeded my needs.  I also posted questions about using
regular expressions when comparing records to search values within an
MPE/iX (SPLASH! and Business Basic) program.  Again, the answer proved that
MPE exceeded my needs.  But once again, this is a hybrid application.

But shouldn't the success of POSIX on MPE/iX be that POSIX is being
integrated into development efforts?  Isn't this proof that adding POSIX
added considerable power and flexibility to MPE/iX?  Doesn't the fact that
the new development uses BOTH MPE/iX features and POSIX features show that
there is strength in both and that together they are more valuable than
either is alone?

We are still early in the development of our one-of-a-kind application.  We
have no plans to migrate off of MPE/iX during the next five years.  We do
have HP hardware and HP software support - 24x7.

Still, the question is, was adding POSIX to MPE/iX worth HP's effort?  I'd
have to say "YES" as without POSIX we wouldn't have purchased an HP 3000,
and having ruled out Windows, Linux, and Unix as lacking features and
capabilities we needed, I'm not sure what we would have, but it might have
been big and blue.

John

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