| Up until this past February, the primary job of the VWS group was to
keep the existing UIS customer base happy. This mostly consisted of
bugfixes, some new hardware support and the illusion that significant
effort was still being invested in VWS by providing some amount o new
functionality (ReGIS, TEK4125, Plane Masks, etc.).
Now that DECwindows has released, the job of the VWS group shifts to
providing migration and compatability services, while continuing the
support of the existing workstations running native UIS (where an
absolute commitment has been made for the next several years of
continued full-service support and development - i.e. Don't Panic!)
One quick thing that has been done is to provide a monochrome X11 Server
that runs on top of UIS. This low-performance server provides an
environment that can be used for development and some testing and to
"kick the tires". The idea is that for a period of time UIS will
continue to be required as the primary windowing system until all of
(or the critical mass of) the production application code has been
rewritten for DECwindows.
Some other tools and documentation have been developed for VWS V4.2
which will allow conversion of .UIS files into .DDIF files. A source
code annotator will point out UIS calls and suggest X11 calls and
places to look for more information. And a short document describes
the differences between UIS and DECwindows and provides pointers,
examples and equivalence tables for help in porting.
As DECwindows/X11 becomes viable and more application code (especially
high-performance third party software) is ported, DECwindows will
become the windowing system of choice. In addition, as time goes on
more (and faster) hardware will be built that does not have native UIS
support. This is the point when 'compatability' becomes critical and
"UIS on X11" becomes a attractive investment in resources.
I will not go into detail here, as Phase 0 has yet to close. Do not
ask for any detail or timeframes. All I will say is, given the above,
we are working on the problem.
_Fred
Project Leader,
VWS/DECwindows Migration
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