Re: [9fans] GNU Make

[ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote:

> I can only presume that dhog was under pressure to build GCC (how could
> he not be?) and that it was simpler to bootstrap it using GCC itself.  
> As far as I understand, both GCC and the binutils are fairly portable,
> there ought to be a way to port GCC using the native compiler in its APE
> impersonation.

yes, but I was hoping the iterative process from 0.x would get us native,
i.e.  skip APE. In the early days gcc was very portable, and would compile
under just about any C compiler. Nowadays, what with all the lovely
extras, I'm not sure it compiles well under non-gcc-compatible compilers.

> Lastly, APE attempts to compute errno by searching a list of error
> strings to find a match.  Would it be out of the question to enhance
> all Plan 9 software to use a library of error messages that also
> includes a numeric code?  

I did this on v9fs in the early days: error messages in my 9p looked 
like this:
xxxx You screwed up

xxxx was the error code. You screwed up was an error message. On systems
without errstr, you returned xxxx as a number, otherwise, you return the
message. So you had an errno and errstr compatible TERRROR message at the
protocol level. 

I proposed this a while back to some folks but got a negative response.

I still find that doing strcmp() on a set of error strings to produce
errno is both gross and non-portable due to subtle variations in error
strings between different Unixes.


ron