[Simh] MicroVax 3900 Networking on a Macbook Air

[Zachary Kline]

Mark et al,

Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense. I have gone ahead and switched to using Macports, which works as expected. SIMH has been built with VDE support, and I just need to test it now.

Sorry for the confusion,
Zack.
> On Oct 4, 2015, at 5:40 AM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm <Mark at infocomm.com> wrote:
> 
> Well, the 0readme_ethernet.txt clearly says that on OS X the MacPorts 
> net/vde2 should be used.
> 
> The deeper point here is that, in general, we support vendor supplied 
> package install locations (and configurations) which, if possible, we try to 
> determine dynamically from local tools.  The thinking here is that the vendor 
> supplied packages have been configured and tested by a very wide audience 
> and thus work with many cases, where a personally built package may have 
> any number of subtle configuration issues which we're not in the business
> of troubleshooting.
> 
> Historically /usr/local has always been the default destination for personally 
> built packages and as such is exactly why it is avoided since the goal is to 
> avoid using personally built packages.
> 
> On OS X, some dependent components are provided by Apple, and anything 
> else is referenced from where MacPorts drops things.  
> 
> Folks who build dependent packages and install them on their own in 
> their 'personally preferred' locations get to make 'personal adjustments' 
> to the makefile, and they get to deal with things which don't work for 
> them but work fine for others.  Real negative experiences have driven this 
> philosophy.
> 
> In the early simh days, we needed some functionality in libpcap which was 
> in the www.tcpdump.org source tree but hadn't made it to any of the vendor 
> OS platforms.  This was the only external package any simh simulator needed.   
> We forced folks to locally build libpcap and it worked well for many folks 
> (especially those who built packages regularly), but there were support issues.  
> These support issues got worse as time went on and the set of simh users were 
> mostly ones coming back to use the VAX or PDP11 simulators for nostalgic 
> reasons of their early school or work days and may not have had any familiarity 
> with locally building open source packages.   By the time these support problems 
> started the needed functionality was widely distributed in all popular host 
> systems, so  things were changed to move to use vendor supplied libpcap and 
> the screwy user cases disappeared.  As new functionality has been added to 
> simh which have leveraged other external packages, the philosophy of using 
> vendor supplied packages has continued to be most successful.
> 
> - Mark