[6192] in Athena Bugs
Re: decmips 7.1H: ahelp
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Oct 9 18:50:17 1990
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 1990 18:49:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, drmorris@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9010032148.AA10981@TAILGUNNER>
I am unable to duplicate your problem.
The executive summary is:
You ran the friendly testers version of andrew but are not a friendly
tester. You didn't customize your environment to prevent the blow-up
that occurs if you mix andrew on the system packs with the friendly
testers version.
The long form is:
I could not get onto e40-008-10, so I tested by loging onto boom,
another mips machine, and remotely logging onto my Vax and my RT.
I ran ahelp on my Vax and on my RT with the display set to boom:0.0. In
neither case did it core dump.
I noticed that the cursors were mangled, and the fill patterns in the
scroll bar were wrong, and that on the vax, the console spit out many
warnings about un-aligned data. This is because there are NO fonts set
up for the decmips, and due to the non-obvious place that fonts are
sought when running andrew remotely.
The andrew application tells the X server to look for fonts appropriate
to the hosttype of the machine running the application. For example,
when I ran remotely to my RT, it told the X server to look in
/mit/andrew/rt/X11fonts. When I remotely ran stuff from my vax, it told
the X server to look in /mit/andrew/vax/X11fonts.
The reason it doesn't tell the X server to look in
/mit/andrew/decmips/X11fonts is because it is impossible to ask an X
server what kind of host it is running on. So people who run remotely
have to know a little extra and hand set their font paths. When
everyone runs andrew out of /usr/andrew/bin, and when there is a
/usr/andrew/bin everywhere this problem will go away. The X consortium
assures me that anyone who needs to know what kind of host the X server
is on is thinking about the world in the wrong way.
We do a little to compensate for this problem by using the native X
fonts as much as possible. The server, however must be able to see the
special aliases file that tells which server fonts correspond to Andy
fonts. But that file is common to all platforms, and the vax or the rt
one would run just fine on the PMAX.
Still, on the off chance that when you logged in to tailgunner, your
login did not attach any andrew filesystem, I detached andrew and ran
again. Still no core dump, just wrong fonts for the displayed
characters as well as the cursors, and stipple fills.
----
I think, however that the problem is not the fact that we do not yet
support Andrew at all for the decmips. I noticed from your paste-in
that you ran ATK version 15.0. This is the friendly testers version of
Andrew. The error message complained of a problem running
/usr/andrew/bin/help.
I notice you are not on the list of friendly testers. If you were a
friendly tester you would have been informed that the friendly testers
version of andrew is incompatible with the regular version. It is so
incompatible that if you do not modify your search path to prevent
running programs from /usr/andrew/bin, you will get random nasty core
dumps. The run-time loaded libraries and the executables are a matched
set, you see.
If you, yourself, did not attach nandrew, but got version 15.0, it means
that someone else on e40-008-10 did so, and then left it attached when
they left.
If you want to use nandrew for real, you must become a friendly tester
of andrew. Do you want to?
-wdc
