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From: rees@pisa.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Floating point
Message-ID: <4cf253e2.1bc5b@pisa.ifs.umich.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 90 20:12:55 GMT
References: <9009181421.AA22513@richter.mit.edu> <4ce36164.12c9a@digital.sps.mot.com> <4ce8cf0c.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <1990Sep21.172129.13644@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
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Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
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In article <1990Sep21.172129.13644@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>, system@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (System Admin (Mike Peterson)) writes:
  None of this nonsense would be necessary if the following suggestion,
  which I made to Apollo 2 years ago, had been acted on:

...

  Having an environment variable solves all the problems, and it should be
  set by the boot script AUTOMATICALLY to the correct option - no
  intervention by the SysAdmin to set it is needed, since 'config' knows
  what your system has.

Much as I hate the current state of affairs, this is unrealistic.  I like
the environment variable but having the default be to generate code that is
guaranteed to work only on the node it was compiled on would flood the net
(and customer service) with complaints.

I would set it up as suggested, but comment out the EV setting in the "boot
script" (/etc/rc*).  Then the sys admin could enable this "feature" at his
own peril.  Otherwise the default would be 'cpu any'.

By the way, this can all be done (if somewhat slowly) by replacing /bin/cc
with a shell script.