[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Fritz Wuehler]

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> > IBM can do this stuff correctly, UNIX can't. UNIX and NFS 
> > are broken, this is just one of a million stupid UNIX non-designs.
> 
> What does IBM do? On which system?

IBM shares DASD in a sysplex, across multiple physical machines, with full
integrity. Standard on MVS at least since ESA (circa 1987) maybe earlier.

> >> Why would you expect that in the case of an NFS disk?
>  
> >> As previously mentioned, the result is data loss.
> 
> > Two phase commit. Don't depend on clients and servers to always get 
> > along, plan for the times they don't. Don't lose data. Don't hang 
> > a client machine. It's all basic, obvious stuff for a serious OS. 
> > UNIX needs work, lots and lots of work.
> 
> I suppose you could return a fatal write error to the client program,
> which pretty much means data loss. How many programs have a way to
> handle a write failure by writing the data somewhere else?

What difference does that make? Are you saying since the client code is
broken we have to accept data loss? Other systems don't work that way. The
transaction gets backed out if the server doesn't respond and the server
backs out from its logs when it comes back up. UNIX isn't ready for prime
time and it won't ever be because the people involved with it don't
understand what data integrity is or what software engineering is. They just
put broken shit out there with cutesy names that relies on ten thousand
other pieces of shit and pat themselves on the back.

UNIX is borked because robustness was never a part of the design and people
said what you just said "how How many programs have a way to  handle a write
failure by writing the data somewhere else?" instead of saying "data
integrity matters and we will always leave your files, databases, etc. in a
known, consistent state"