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From: bill@camco.Celestial.COM (Bill Campbell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: DOS cross-development under SCO Unix?
Message-ID: <776@camco.Celestial.COM>
Date: 16 Mar 91 22:11:45 GMT
References: <6923@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>
Organization: Celestial Software, Mercer Island, WA
Lines: 46

In <6923@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) writes:

>My company does much of its C source code development under DOS, and is
>currently switching over to a DOS extender product to break the 640K
>barrier.

>Recently I started to play with the DOS cross-development support provided
>by SCO, and I must say I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to set
>up and at how much faster the compiler and linker run under Unix than
>under DOS.  (Microsoft C running in 386 native mode, producing code for
>an 8086, compiles a whole lot faster than it does in 8086 mode.)

>Now the question I have for SCO and third-party vendors is this:  is there
>any way to cross-develop under Unix for an extended DOS target
>environment?

>This is not a particularly urgent need for us, but it's oh-so-much-nicer
>to use the Unix development environment than the DOS environment,
>particularly considering the speedup of the 'make' process.  And given
>our shift to DOS extenders, we cannot make much use of the SCO cross-
>development environment as it stands today.

>-rich

I am not real familiar with ``DOS extenders'' are these something
like Hamburger Helper?

More seriously I developed the conversion program for Microrim
that converts old versions of R:BASE applications to R:BASE 3.x.
I did this entirely on SCO Xenix (originally 2.2.4) and the
ability to use the Unix tools was invaluable to me since I break
out in a violent rash whenever I get in the same room with a DOS
machine.  I did all the development and testing under Xenix and
would do a final compile with the -dos option to the compile to
create the .exe file.

The biggest problem I had was when Microrim wanted to be able to
compile the source under DOS was that I had to make all my
include library files DOS-compliant file names.  I had never
worried about what I put in front of the .h and .c and several
files (like termcodes.h) had to be shortened.  It also made me
appreciate how kludgey the Microsoft library and make are.
-- 
INTERNET:  bill@Celestial.COM   Bill Campbell; Celestial Software
UUCP:   ...!thebes!camco!bill   6641 East Mercer Way
             uunet!camco!bill   Mercer Island, WA 98040; (206) 947-5591