C News patch of 16-Jan-1990

[Henry Spencer]

In article <KGR$Z|@rpi.edu> tale at cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes:
>What is the preferred method of getting C News re-installed after
>patching?  What I've been doing is running doit.bin -i, doit.bin,
>doit.news and then again.root.  The introduction for this patch, with
>talk of build being revamped to use previous answers, makes me wonder
>whether I was suppose to run build each time.  (Well, things _seem_ to
>be working ...)  Is there anything added to build that require it
>being used again?

In general, re-build is seldom or never necessary.  I should look at some
way to inform people about this automatically, though.  There are some
possible changes in the queue that might require it.  Actually, a re-build
is probably in order now, because dbmclose() is an issue that affects
the doit files.

The doit.* sequence you suggest is reasonable in general.

>By the way, how come it does -Dvoid=int? ...

Um, where?  The only instances of this I can find in our makefiles are
commented out.  There is one -DVOID=int, but that's a slightly different
story -- the problem there is turkeys who have gratuitously changed
system library functions that used to return (meaningless) int values
to return void instead.  Unfortunately, ANSI C has even blessed some
of these gratuitous incompatibilities, so we can't just blame them on
broken systems.  This is one of those cases where you just can't win;
the -DVOID=int is needed for most current systems but is technically wrong.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu