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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 3/18/2012 7:25 AM, Fritz Wuehler wrote:
> 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"
>

Unix seems to be in wide use whatever WE think!  I doubt that that will 
change unless several major disasters are proven to be the fault of one 
or more Unix or Unix-Like operating systems.

We don't hear of very many disasters caused by Unix and probably won't!