Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ria!uwovax!7103_2622
From: 7103_2622@uwovax.uwo.ca (Eric Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: MiNT: first things first
Message-ID: <7201.270540b3@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 30 Sep 90 04:47:47 GMT
References: <1990Sep25.175226.6410@doe.utoronto.ca> <1990Sep26.220620.27988@math.lsa.umich.edu> <1990Sep27.170514.19506@agate.berkeley.edu>
Lines: 40

In article <1990Sep25.175226.6410@doe.utoronto.ca> david@doe.utoronto.ca (David Megginson) writes:
>Maybe what we need most of all for MiNT is a reasonably good
>clone of the Unix system library for Gnu. If someone rewrites
>gnu.olb to recognise and use MiNT, porting programs will be
>a cinch. Perhaps CRT0 should check whether MiNT is present,
>and set a global variable _mint to TRUE or FALSE (and do the
>same for _rtx, of course). Then the library can use these 
>variables to decide how to execute system functions.

   Not much sooner said than done; I just sent the modified source code for
the GCC library to atari.archive (the file is called mintlib.zoo; check
for it in the newitems directory, it should be there soon). The library
is optimized for MiNT, in the sense that I didn't bother trying to emulate
things like fork() and vfork() under TOS (as in previous versions of
the library, there's a spawnve() call to emulate fork/exec/wait in TOS; under
MiNT you can also use spawnve() to start things in the background). The
external variable __mint is set to the MiNT version we're running under,
or 0 for TOS.
   This library can compile the Sun version of bash with 0 changes (well,
if you're doing it on an ST instead of a Sun you'll have to rename "y.tab.c"
and "y.tab.h" to "y,tab.c" and "y,tab.h", or whatever the names are
that your Yacc clone outputs). This is not to say that bash has been ported
to MiNT. The path code should be changed to accept commas instead of colons,
and the startup file names should be modified (to "bash.pro" instead of
".bash-profile", etc.); and it would be nice to be able to type "ls" instead
of ls.ttp. I hope someone can do this polishing; I haven't got a whole lot
of time.
   I don't know RTX well enough to try to write a library for it;
also, my primary interest is in compiling Unix (BSD flavor) software, and
MiNT is (by design) better suited to this than RTX. (Conversely, RTX is
better at lightweight processes than MiNT is; a cthreads library for RTX
would be almost trivial). So the MiNT library doesn't support RTX at all.
Since everything is in source form, you can add this support if you want.
It would probably be worthwhile, since lots of people use RTX.
--
Eric R. Smith                     email:
Dept. of Mathematics            ersmith@uwovax.uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario   ersmith@uwovax.bitnet
London, Ont. Canada N6A 5B7
ph: (519) 661-3638