Cave Men and Dinosaurs

[Steve Green]

In article <573 at afsg.apple.com> ron at afsg.apple.com (Ron Flax) writes:
>In article <numb.675098076 at el_greco> numb at cs.qmw.ac.uk writes:
>>I'm getting more and more fed up of trying to bring software from usenet
>>up on our A/UX machines. So few things compile without considerable massaging
>
>Matt,
>
>I'd like to hear what software you are trying to port.  I have quite
>easily ported many things that have been posted/available on USENET to
>A/UX.  A/UX provides most everything you need to port BSD, SYSV, and
>even POSIX apps. All of the relevent USENET news software, less, emacs,
>gcc, gdb, gas, rn, tcsh, ntp, nntp, etc, etc, etc... So what's the problem.
>
>[deleted stuff about the Apple's commitment to AUX]

Ditto.

If you (Matt) expect stuff from USENET to just compile "out of the box" then
you are mislead.  Most of the stuff from USENET works great on the most popular
platforms.. of course.. thats what people are using.  (Sun, Dec, etc..)
Many other UNIX platforms suffer from the same problem that AUX does.. its
not vanilla this or vanilla that.  Things are no different for many of the
other SysV based machines with BSD extensions.  (I have had many of the same
problems with IRIX and Unicos that I originally had with AUX)

A program with any degree of complexity is going to have #ifdefs for
different platforms.  The problem as I see it is that too many assumptions
are made if you #define SYSV.  Programs that have #ifdefs based on system
calls, include files, libraries, etc.. usually port without any trouble to
AUX.  (Larry Wall's stuff is great)

AUX is actually a very good platform to port stuff to.  Just remember, it could
have been 172 386s that you have...

Seriously though, if you port something to AUX, send the patches back to the
original author so they can get worked in.  As well, send it to one of the
archives so we all can benifit.

-- 
Silica gel -- Do not eat.				steveg at melmac.umd.edu

Disclaimer:  If anything I said above is incorrect, never mind.