Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!ea.ecn.purdue.edu!housel
From: housel@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Peter S. Housel)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: C-News on Minix?
Message-ID: <15809@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 23 Sep 89 02:01:32 GMT
References: <24690@louie.udel.EDU>
Sender: housel@ea.ecn.purdue.edu
Reply-To: housel@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Peter S. Housel)
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Lines: 49

In article <24690@louie.udel.EDU>, HELMER%SDNET (Guy Helmer) writes:
>Does anyone have C-News running on Minix?  I'm (finally) getting UUPC
>compiled and I'm ready to get C-News up, so if anyone has patches or
>hints, please send mail.  Thanks.
>-- Guy Helmer                                  AT&T: (605) 256-5315

	I'm working REALLY hard on it, but it's still not there yet.
Notable problems, in no particular order:

1) AWK. C News makes extensive use of AWK, and Minix doesn't really
have an acceptable version. I have ported GNU Awk version 1.02 (the
"old AWK" version) to Minix, and plan to post it Real Soon Now.
Note that it will require the floating point package.

2) fopen(file, "[rwa]+") gets used, and the old stdio can't handle it.
Earl Chew's stdio package should take care of this.

3) expr's colon operator gets used. (C news was one of the reasons my
replacement version got written.) There are minor problems with other
programs that mostly get used in shell scripts.

4) sh. This is the biggest problem of all. C news is largely written
in /bin/sh scripts, and the Minix version of sh doesn't hold together
very well under stress. Larry Wall's 'Configure' script and the C news
programs show this very well. In particular, '$'-variable expansion
and '\'-quoting don't work according to spec at all. The "." (source)
command is a disaster.  I have fixes for some of the problems, but
they're not ready yet.

5) ".o" files. This is a problem with porting almost anything to Minix.
Somebody, please, write an 'as' and 'ld'! (Preferably with simulated
virtual memory...)

6) memory. Since everything is written in 'sh'-scripts, you can easily
get things nested deeply enough that a system with small memory
will run out of memory pretty quickly - especially in a system without
the Protected Memory extensions.

7) The version of 'patch' distributed with Minix had problems coping
with some of the C news updates. Upgrading from Patch 2.0 patchlevel 4
to patchlevel 12 solves this problem.

8) expire makes minor use of floating point for date conversions.

	In short: it's a challenge, some help would be appreciated, and
as soon as it get done you will know about it. (And then we can start
flooding news.newsites :-)

-Peter S. Housel-	housel@ecn.purdue.edu		...!pur-ee!housel