On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 09:26:38PM +0200, Georg Schwarz wrote:
> > <To Georg>: What libs is the irix adaption based on? 
> >             Im not convinced, that a pkgsrc for nextstep project is easier than the IRIX adaptation.
> >             But it would be a nice project.
> 
> I took the standard IRIX 5.3 libs and header files as supplied by SGI.
> There are a number of issues, but having been popular 10 years ago,
> much GNU software still more or less supports it; at least the standard
> stuff (OK, some needed a big of cleaning, which I then fed back to the
> original authors). All right, maybe NextStep really is harder...
> 
> What is the particular problem you are facing?

Mostly the absence of POSIX functions, their wrong implementation, or wrong grouping.
Their is a lot of magic in configure scripts based on the  assumption that certain posix features are
grouped. I.e. they either exist as a group or don't. This makes perfect sence, since this groups are 
needed as a group to give some reasonable functionality.

Well you only have a chance to notice this, if you use NextSTEP as a testbed ;-)

I administrated a NextSTEP network for 12 years, 
and it hit's me any time compiling free software (IIRC pain started back in 1996 when POSIX gets more and more used).

Well I know many many usual work arounds ... so i think a new library is much less work than patching 
5000 packages. Moreover you can think of lying about your personality.
Since the mach kernel emulates BSD, it should be posible to build to adapt BSD kernel based libraries (in theory).
Realy an old dream of mine. 

The other aproach would be to patch up the header files, since their is much more posix in the libs,
than in their headers. Yeah, their is a lot of dirt under the cover of this well designed boxes.
But I think Jobs still sticks to this tradition. But if you are used to IRIX, 
you should be confortable with this kind of pains ;-)) I'm not picking on SGI. 
They build wonderful machines. Realy great engineering. 
But they also spend not enough money in their OS devision.


> 
> 
> -- 
> Georg Schwarz    http://home.pages.de/~schwarz/
>  georg.schwarz@freenet.de  +49 178 8545053
> 
> 

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