From: CRDGW2::CRDGW2::MRGATE::"SMTP::CRVAX.SRI.COM::RELAY-INFO-VAX" 18-JUL-1989 17:35 To: MRGATE::"ARISIA::EVERHART" Subj: L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews: Part 1 -- L&T Reviews Message-Id: <8907182119.AA05491@crdgw1.ge.com> Received: From KL.SRI.COM ([0.0.0.0]) by CRVAX.SRI.COM with TCP; Tue, 18 JUL 89 05:05:25 PDT Received: from AAMRL.AF.MIL by KL.SRI.COM with TCP; Tue, 18 Jul 89 04:56:47 PDT Received: from FALCON by AAMRL.AF.MIL; Tue, 18 Jul 89 07:53 EDT Date: Tue, 18 Jul 89 07:55 EST From: Ted Nieland <@AAMRL.AF.MIL:TNIELAND@FALCON> Subject: L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews: Part 1 -- L&T Reviews To: info-vax@kl.sri.COM, ccavax!lmrc!hassinger@uunet.uu.NET X-Vms-To: IN%"info-vax@kl.sri.com" Attached is part 1 of the L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews. The reviews are broken in to several parts and will be posted over the next week or so. These reviews will be published in the DECUS Newsletters. Permission is granted to publish them in DECUS LUG Newsletters and other DECUS Publications. Ted Nieland TNIELAND@AAMRL.AF.MIL DECUS L&T SIG Steering Committee The Spring 1989 L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews Earle Ake Science Applications Intl. Corp. Todd Aven Computer Associates International Jack Davis Phillips Consumer Electronics Daniel Graham Dynamics Research Corporation Rand Hall Merrimack College David Hittner Pioneer Standard Electronics Ted Nieland Control Data Corporation Jon Pinkley Westinghouse Electric Corporation This is a review of a L&T section of Spring 1989 L&T/VAX SIG Tape. Due to the large amount of overlap between the L&T and VAX SIG tapes, the Tape editors decided to combine the tapes into one large tape with no overlap. This SIGs tape contains many useful items for people with VAX Computers and people interested in Languages and Tools. The reviews VAX submissions to the tape will be published in the Pageswapper. The reviewers have scoured through most of the tape and have jotted down the following notes on the material that is on the tape. Not everything on the tape is reviewed due to the shear volume of material, but it is hoped that this review will help people in deciding what on the tape might be useful to them. The SIG tapes are a project started by the SIGs a while back as a method of distributing free software that might be helpful to others. Not all of the material on the tapes are "finished" products. The encapsulated reviews are rated on a 1-5 scale with 5 being excellent. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.AVEN_MAKE] Ease Of Installation: 4 Documentation: 3 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: No This submission is Todd Aven's MAKE for VMS. (MAKE comes from the Unix world. It is similar to MMS.) This version of MAKE is used by implementors of PMDF and DECUS UUCP to build those utilities. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.Bauer...] Ease of Installation: 2 Documentation: 4 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 3 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: yes - .msg, .scn, .tex, .mms, .c Objects Supplied: yes Description: CKMAP - Check Map - scans a VMS link map for PSECT mismatches and undefined symbols and reports these. DISK_REPORT - disk report tool that scans directory log files and produces reports summarizing disk usage. SMC - Show Merged CMS Classes - checks that all members of one CMS class are also members of another CMS class. IMGDEF - Image Definition tool - supports automated generation of link MMS and options files. RCMS - Remote CMS Server - provides an interface to CMS libraries on a different DECnet node. DCOPY - Delete/Copy - deletes file in destination directory before copying a new version there. MMSGEN - MMS Generator for source - generates compile MMS for files with extensions: .FOR ,.EQF, .EQE, .FBL, .C, .SCN, .MSG, .MAR, .MBL, and .X. LNKCHK - Link Check tool - verifies the existence of a input files on a link command, executing the link command if all inputs exist. OPTCHK - Link Options file checker - checks that all input files listed in a link option file exist and are readable. Observations: All look like useful utilities, but there are three obvious winners in this submission: the Remote CMS Server, and the two that generate MMS dependency files. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.GNUSOFTWARE] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 1 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: No This directory contains the compressed-tar savesets for the GNU software. Included is GCC, GAS, GNU EMACS, GAWK, GNU GREP, GCC++, and others. This is the actual tar savesets from the Free Software Foundation. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.GNUSOFTWARE.VMSGCC134] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 1 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C (in upper directory) Objects Supplied: No This directory contains the VMS port of the GNU GCC compiler Version 1.34. This compiler doesn't have all the niceties of the DEC compiler (it doesn't create list files, it doesn't give nice error messages, etc), but it does put out good code. Many sites are using this compiler for commercial work. This directory also has BISON, the GNU version of YACC. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.GNUSOFTWARE.VMS_GAWK] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 1 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: No This directory contains the VMS port of the GNU AWK utility. It isn't the latest version of GNU AWK, but it is a working version. Awk is a pattern scanning and processing language. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.GNUSOFTWARE.VMS_GGREP] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 1 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: No This directory contains the VMS port of the GNU GREP utility. It isn't the latest version of GNU GREP, but it is a working version. GREP is a very powerful utility for searching a file for a pattern. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.GNUSOFTWARE.VMS_BIN] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 1 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C (in above directory) Objects Supplied: No This directory contains the VMS executables for AWK, LEX, DIFF, GREP and SORTC. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.LOMASKY] Ease Of Installation: 4 Documentation: 1 Intended Audience: BASIC Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, in BASIC and Macro Objects Supplied: No This directory numerous functions for use in VAX Basic. The session LT029 "VAX Basic Toolkit of Useful Callable Functions" was about this toolkit. These functions can be linked to other languages, but you need VAX BASIC to compile them first. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.MEMOREX_TELEX.ETHERNET] Ease of installation: 4 Documentation: 3 Intended Audience: System Managers Ease of use: 4 Usefulness: 4 Sources Included: Y (Pascal) Objects Supplied: Y [Tape Editor's Note: The MEMOREX_TELEX submission could have been on either the VAX or L&T section of the SIG Tape. It was placed in L&T section.] This directory contains 2 ethernet tools. ETHERMON is an ethernet monitor that displays packets/sec, bytes/sec, and top receiving and transmitting nodes ala VMS MONITOR. INEPT is an ethernet packet watcher. Both of these tools are valuable. Both utilities use a user-built database to translate ethernet hex addresses to more meaningful mnemonic names (ex. DECnet node name). Inept has major security implications since it reads everything (like passwords) floating over the wire. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.MEMOREX_TELEX.SDE] Ease of installation: 3 Documentation: 5 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of use: 4 Usefulness: 4 Sources Included: Y (Pascal) Objects Supplied: Y The Memorex Telex Software Development Environment is a collection of tools built around DEC/CMS and DEC/MMS for the purpose of source, module, and configuration management. If you don't mind adopting Memorex Telex's software development style this could improve your development time and ease maintenance quite a bit. Documentation is extensive. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.MDRAW] Ease of Installation: 5 Documentation: 5 Intended Audience: General, TeX & LaTeX users Ease of use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources included: Yes, PASCAL, FORTRAN, C Objects Supplied: Yes, except ones written in FORTRAN A object-oriented drawing utility for TeX, a mouse and a VT2xx or VT3xx graphics terminal. A utility written for the VT240, or VT330 series terminal that allows the user to input designs and view them on the screen. You may also save the pictures to a file to be later included in your TeX output. A little time consuming to use, but a lot of fun. All you TeX and LaTeX users, check this one out. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.RemTab] Ease of Installation: 4 Documentation: 4 Intended Audience: Programmers Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 4 Sources Included: yes - Cobol, Macro, Runoff Objects Supplied: some Description: A package of routines to implement the ability to share static tabular data between multiple programs. Observations: Uses a special 'library' file containing multiple tables, there are utilities to allow creation and maintenance of the library files. Implemented for Cobol, but could well be useful for other languages. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.TEX] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 2 Intended Audience: TeX and LaTeX users Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: No This directory contains compressed-tar savesets of various TeXware for UNIX systems. The items include TeXX, for previewing DVI files under X-Windows; SPIDER, which creates different versions of WEB, and TEXPS, a Postscript DVI driver that makes use of Postscript fonts. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.TEX.MAKEINDEX] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 4 Intended Audience: LaTeX users Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 4 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: Yes This a utility to help LaTeX users generate Index information from the output of LaTeX. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.TEX.PROFILE] Ease Of Installation: 1 Documentation: 2 (in the WEB code) Intended Audience: PASCAL Programmers Ease of Use: 3 Usefulness: 4 Sources Included: Yes, WEB/PASCAL Objects Supplied: Yes This directory contains a early copy of the VMS port of Donald Knuth's PROFILE program to PROFILE a program. It allows a PASCAL programmer to see how much time each section of code uses. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.TEX.XDVI] Ease Of Installation: 4 Documentation: 2 Intended Audience: TeX and LaTeX users Ease of Use: 4 Usefulness: 5 Sources Included: Yes, C Objects Supplied: No This is DECWindows previewer for DVI files. It is the port of the XDVI program to VMS and DECWindows. It does a good job, even though it doesn't have any fancy trappings like most DECwindows/X-Windows applications. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.tpuVI_V5...] Ease of Installation: 2 Documentation: 4 Intended Audience: General,Programmers Ease of Use: 3 Usefulness: 3 Sources Included: yes - TPU, Macro, and Runoff Objects Supplied: no Description: An implementation of the VI editor written in TPU. Observations: Uses only the normal typing keys on the keyboard - great for those with strange terminals on their VAX. Also of interest to those already familiar with it. Submission Subdirectory: [LT89A.XEVE5] Ease Of Installation: 3 Documentation: 3 Intended Audience: General Ease of Use: 3 Usefulness: 4 Sources Included: Yes, FORTRAN Objects Supplied: Yes This is a Spelling checker for EVE under VMS Version 5. It comes with a 91,000 word dictionary.