Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!mailrus!cornell!rochester!dibble
From: dibble@cs.rochester.edu (Peter C. Dibble)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os9
Subject: Re: Porting Unix software to OS/9
Message-ID: <1989Jun23.190930.12112@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 23 Jun 89 19:09:30 GMT
References: <373@torch.UUCP>
Reply-To: dibble@cs.rochester.edu (Peter C. Dibble)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 32

If you are porting to OS-9/6809, you can expect hard work.  The Microware 6809
C compiler is K&R compliant, not UNIX-like.  If you are porting to 
OS-9/68000, and you have the latest Microware C compiler, the port may
take no effort at all.

For perspective:
  I ported hack several years ago with an almost 6809-like version of
  the C compiler.  It took more than a week of evenings.

  I ported Bison, flex, egrep, and gnu awk in less than an hour each.
  One of them, probably Bison, involved about 5 minutes of messing with
  the make file, and that was all.

Low-level stuff like fork and settty's take some effort, (the ioctls were
a problem for ports of sz/rz and pcom) but most programs don't do stuff like
that.

So.  Advice:
  *  Get the latest compiler.  The one they just released  is best.
  *  There are some UNIX-compatibility libraries around.  I don't use them
	 much, but they do make ports a bit faster.
  *  If the programs include _very_ long lines, or macros that expand to
	 very long lines, do something about it.  The C preprocessor and
	 the compiler will both crash unpleasantly if you feed them oversized
	 lines.
  *  Get the varargs package for OS-9 or look for all functions that take
	 a variable number of arguments and "do something" about them.

Ask about the software you mean to port.  One of us may already
have ported it.

Peter