[566] in Zephyr_Bugs
status of zephyr's portability
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (E. Jay Berkenbilt)
Tue Nov 8 13:20:56 1994
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 94 13:03:52 EST
From: ejb@ERA.COM (E. Jay Berkenbilt)
To: bug-zephyr@MIT.EDU
As a former MIT student and athena person, I tend to bring
zephyr around wherever I go and install it. This is getting
harder and harder to do for the following reasons:
1. Zephyr.p3 is not portable. It's got a handful of
machine-specific ifdef's in it, but that's it. Getting it
to work on a new platform is difficult.
2. It's been ages since a public release as far as I can tell.
The version on athena-dist is ancient, and the version in
the zephyr locker is not configured to build outside of the
Athena environment. Perhaps this version has addressed some
of the portability issues since you have to have it working
on SGI, Solaris 2, etc.
Is there a new release scheduled any time in the future? If
not, does anyone on the zephyr team know of any software that is
comparable in functionality even if it isn't as scalable? All I
really want is the ability to send interactive messages to
people without knowing where they are logged in and to be able
to send group messages.
It would be nice if the zephyr team would follow the lead of
Kerberos 5, gnu, etc. and start using some kind of automatic
configuration instead of imake, but that would be too much to
hope for I suppose given that Athena seems not to have all the
new development that it used to...
Any information you have on these issues would be appreciated.
--
E. Jay Berkenbilt (ejb@ERA.COM)
Engineering Research Associates
Formerly qjb@MIT.EDU
