From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 08:00:07 -0600 From: ron minnich To: lucio@proxima.alt.za, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] GNU Make In-Reply-To: <0ffa2db088558e493a30ecad96ee426e@proxima.alt.za> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 904468c4-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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