Envoy source and availability

[NinjaCyborg]

Heinz Wrobel still owns it. Multiple people have asked him over the years if he would sell it or release it and he always says no. Just another stubborn butthurt bastard like all the others in Amiga land. Shame, as Envoy was a lovely piece of software for the time.

[NinjaCyborg]

I love Envoy. Even if when it was new it was still a bit behind the curve of AppleTalk and Windows for Workgroups. But it's of that era - a generation where people still used proprietary transport layer protocols instead of only TCP and UDP. At the same time it was still IP based and therefore could share layer 3 with other stacks without clashing with each other. Nothing hackish about it at all.

I loved how well designed it was for the Amiga architecture. Services weren't daemons in the unix sense, instead, like all things amiga, they were shared libraries. There are same great examples of services that extend it's functionality on aminet, like the conf and talk services (source code available too).

It's correct to say that today in 2024 we would likely just use TCP/IP based services, and similarly that no one needs a LAN printer server - chances are any modern printer is its own server or accepts direct wifi print jobs, while cloud drives replaced peer to peer file sharing.

It's a shame Heinz is such a prick about making it available one way or another.

[NinjaCyborg]

@kolla

You seem to be unable to differentiate between versions 1, 2 and 3. Olsen is talking about version 1. Perhaps you have reading comprehension issues. I would see a doctor if I were you.

[NinjaCyborg]

here's a relevant follow up I'd love to hear an answer from @olsen about

Both Inet225 and Envoy offer service discovery and control mechanisms for 'daemons' effectively. Also, RexxMast could be considered to be a 'daemon' in the unix sense. While AddDataTypes could be considered to be a kind of registry for plugins.

Modern platforms obviously have systemctl, launchd etc for this kind of thing. What would a system wide service discovery and management solution for amiga OS look like?

[NinjaCyborg]

I didn't ask you, and once again, you totally misunderstood the question.

[NinjaCyborg]

> We don't really have a general service discovery mechanism in the Amiga operating system...

Yes exactly I was just wondering if it was something you'd ever thought of how it might work. Obviously we can Run ><NIL: headless things that open message ports and sockets and the like, and yes as kolla says commodities can give you something similar for GUI based applets that have ephemeral user interfaces but benefit from persistent sessions. But perhaps a hypothetical future Amiga OS would benefit from a centralised service management layer. AFAIK you didn't implement inetd in Roadshow?

what's the use case? here's one - every time you want to use an external rexxport, you need to check if the port exists, and if it doesn't, run the host for that port, if you even know where to find it. Or you want to open on a named PUBSCREEN. But you're first to arrive, and the screen isn't open yet.