RE: svr4, again

["Terry Moore" <tmm%mcci.com@localhost>]

> Jason Thorpe wrote:
>>>> While I agree that it’s not exactly difficult to maintain the a.out exec package, I do wonder if there is anyone out there actually running ancient a.out binaries.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> NetBSD 0.9 i386 a.out yes.
>> 
>> Here, too.
>
> Well, then you have my sympathies, my admiration, and my curiosity all at the same time!
>
> No, seriously, what ancient binaries are you running?  (Ok, I admit, it's pretty cool that it still works after all this time...)

Nothing as nice as Franz Lisp. Internal little utilities for which we don’t have source handy and/or we're too lazy to rebuild. I have a (licensed) version of Unipress Emacs, but I finally gave up and rebuilt that around the 5.0 transition because of X issues; and as I'm the only user here for that, and I've finally moved on, it's only the old utilities. It's always just been cheaper (in time) to dig up the 0.9 emulation. We've been running NetBSD since 1994 or so, I think, so these kinds of things accumulate. If github had been around in 1994 they'd probably all be open source and readily buildable. But... 

The big issue with maintaining older tools is that they don't always recompile with new compilers; even if they actually work. People make the toolchains more and more persnickety, and it's just not worth the effort to track the compiler flavor of the week, when the problem is not that the tools are wrong, but that they were written with a more "assembly-language in C" mindset.  Which is seriously out of style.

--Terry