Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 01:38:10 -0400 From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu Cc: molter@logic.it, adrian@obiwan.psinet.net.au, vas@vas.tomsk.su, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: To UNIX or not to UNIX ;-). Was: PPP problems. Message-ID: <199706160538.BAA16814@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <199706160016.UAA15226@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> (devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu)
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>>Yes, but I can't say that we (the Unix community) haven't been guilty >>of the same behaviour. For example: >> * According to the RFC, rlogin should send a terminal type from the >>'Assigned Numbers' list. Unix rlogin, however, invariably sends >>$TERM, whatever it may be. Other OS's simply have to cope. >Has joelh heard of a `defacto standard'? Yes, joelh has. And that's what Bill Gates is trying to do with TCP/IP, and I'm just pointing out that we've done the same things. >I've never used rlogin on any machine which is not some sort of Unixoid. >All the Windows machines and Macs I've used only support telnet. Look at tucows.com; they've got some rlogin programs for Windows. I don't know about Macs. Also, check out VMS. >> * All SMTP, NNTP, etc, etc servers must recognize a newline as a line >>terminator, despite the fact that the proper line terminator is a >>CRLF. >Was the RFC written before the implementations? (I don't know the >answer here, but I'd like to know it.) RFCs must have two separate implementations before becoming standards. But when RFC821 was written in August 1982, Unix shared the ARPANET with other OS's. >Netscape, for example, tends to introduce new featrues which break >existing programs like Lynx. This is a bit different than some >random committee chaning the standard while they write the spec. I don't see your point. >>The GNU project is currently working on a UI layer, known as Teak. I >>haven't seen it in action, and it hasn't yet hit release point, but it >>may be a good thing to add to future FreeBSD releases. Check it out >>at http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/software/teak/teak.html FMI. >I was under the impression all teak really is is a clone of the Mac >finder. Not a completely user interface. That is the part of the UI that we need here; something to launch programs and manipulate files. What do you have in mind? [on E-scape] >(I may well rewrite parts of the user interface >in Guile and use Tk; I don't know yet.) Let's discuss this in private. >>** System configuration [snip] >You're welcome to have that goal, but my expirience is that, at least >with the ISPs I've dealt with, it takes a bit of effort to get the chat >script to work right. I guess if teh user logs in once manually and >the OS learns from that, you might have a usable setup. I know that >what I did could never be done by JRL in two hours. (And I only have >about a five line chat script.) If that were the case, then JRL couldn't use Win95 for PPP connections, and that is very common. In my experience, something like "--in:--in:-${NAME}^M-word:-${PASSWD}^M" works perfectly fine with most ISPs. >>- Netscape Navigator (which we can replace with GNU E-scape when it >>is finished; hurry up nemo!): There we handle WWW, email, and news. >>Although it's not technically very good handling of the second two, it >>is easier to configure and use out of the box than, say, xmh. >E-scape isn't going to handle mail or news anytime soon, at least not >if I'm the only one hacking it. Fine. Then xmh and some simple background POP-retrieval daemon as well. >>- Some basic word processor. I'm not talking about Emacs here, since >>JRL balks at the idea of not having different fonts and sizes >>(although that is in the works for Emacs). Does anybody know of a >>WYSIWYG (or even -ish) TeX editor or something of the sort? >There's a program called Lyx that I've heard of, but it requires that >you use its special template instead of Plain Tex or LaTeX, and it >looks like it is even less stable than [insert name of favorite >proprietary word processor that crashes a lot]. Okay, I'll check it out. >>- A fax program. >An overrated feature of my machine that I happily ignore. Consider it a complement, nemo, when I say that you are not J. Random Luser. >>All of these should be documented somewhere. >Didn't you say something against the usefulness of documentation? I said that docs shouldn't be necessary for elementary tasks. I didn't say that docs shouldn't be availible, or useful. Rather to the contrary, well-written documentation is going to be important for this to succeed. Happy hacking, joelh -- http://www.wp.com/piquan --- Joel Ray Holveck --- joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu All my opinions are my own, not the Free Software Foundation's. Second law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi sendmail: segmentation violation -- core dumped
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