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From: gerry@x-ray.mit.edu (Gerald Swislow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: 2.0 bugs/features
Summary: A few minor problems with 2.0 are described
Keywords: NeXT 2.0 bugs features
Message-ID: <1990Dec29.190758.18458@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 29 Dec 90 19:07:58 GMT
Sender: Gerry Swislow
Followup-To: gerry@x-ray.mit.edu
Organization: Certified Scientific Software
Lines: 63


Here are a few bugs and/or features I have found on Release 2.0.
(Ask_NeXT has been informed.)

1)  The declaration of atof() as a function returning a double
    is no longer made if you include <math.h>.  In release 1.0,
    math.h included <stdlib.h> which contained the declaration.
    (It took me hours to figure out why my programs were producing
    funny numbers because of this little thing.)

2)  /usr/bin/less does a core dump if you use the "E" command
    while running.  The "E" command lets you examine another file.
    I replaced this "less" with the one from release 1.0.

3)  The Icon application dies if you tickle the menus up and
    down.  This is very peculiar.  There is probably just one sensitive
    spot on the menus and you just need to learn to avoid it, I suppose.

4)  You don't get core dumps unless you do an
	unlimit core
    command from somewhere.  I do it from a .login file for an
    interactive csh.  Maybe there is some netinfo setting for it?
    You can also limit the size of core dumps. If the directory
    /cores exists and is writable, core dumps will be put there
    and named "core.pid" with pid being the process id.

5)  Using telnet to talk to the NeXT from somewhere else (in my case
    a 386 running AT&T System V/386) and running "csh" on the NeXT
    has become quite flaky.  The NeXT people say that they added
    something called
	stty -extproc
    that helps somewhat.  It solved the problem of losing characters
    but if I type ^S to stop a scrolling screen, things often get
    hopelessly hung, requiring me to kill processes on the 386 end.
    I had no problems with telnet on release 1.0a.  "rlogin" still
    loses huge blocks of characters, -extproc or not.  This was
    also the case on release 1.0a.  Interestingly all these problems
    are only when running the "csh".  If I type "sh", commands such
    as "ls -l /bin" do not drop characters.

6)  The NeXT people say that the following is done on purpose, but
    it seems a little arbitrary to me.  Anyway, you can no
    longer define a function that uses the same name as one of the
    C library functions or system calls in the shared library.  Of
    course you can easily change the names of your functions in your
    code, but those old sources that provided their own versions of
    printf(), memset(), strchr(), malloc() or whatever will get a
    fatal error from ld when you compile them.  The NeXT
    people say they had to do this because of shared libraries.  Sun
    shared libraries don't care if you redefine names, so it doesn't
    seem as though NeXT had to do this.   In my code (which I port
    to every incarnation of UNIX) I had gotten tired of setting cpp
    flags as to whether a particular system used strchr() or index(),
    strrchr() or rindex(),  memclr() or bzero(), etc., and so I just
    supplied my own versions of strchr(), strrchr(), etc.
    That worked fine until I compiled on 2.0.  I have now changed the
    names of my routines to Strchr(), Strrchr(), etc..  No big deal.

Gerry Swislow
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