Ported U*ix programs to Plan 9?

[Mike Haertel mike@cs.uoregon.edu]

The ape library and the associated "pcc" compiler have worked very well
for me for porting a variety of unix programs to plan 9.

The most annoying aspect of the whole process is not porting C code,
but porting makefiles and the associated shell scripts.

To this end, I have ported the almquist /bin/sh from netbsd, and gnu
make.  Using these tools I have been able to configure and build a
variety* of gnu software right out of the box.  I've also ported the
pbmplus suite of bitmap tools, although that required some small
source changes.

In the process I've found a few bugs in the ape library; most notably
the wait() function does not return exit status correctly.  What I
think happened is the kernel recently started putting the string
"<program>:" into the exit status, and the ape library has not been
updated to know this.

I eventually (september or october) will make all this stuff
available to others, but right now my time is limited.

	Mike

* sorry, no emacs. :-)  It can be done--in 1991, out of sheer masochism,
and to annoy rob, I ported gnu emacs to plan 9.  Fortunately, it has
been lost to the mists of time...