From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Sat,  3 Jul 1993 14:53:53 -0400
From: Mike Haertel mike@cs.uoregon.edu
Subject: Ported U*ix programs to Plan 9?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: fc658566-eac7-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19930703185353.dTJHfWAMbxpAs7z8XJV4Rhp9fK_FWb8aoHarG9aOegU@z>

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...