From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from most.weird.com ([204.92.254.2]) by hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca with SMTP id <24628>; Thu, 6 Mar 1997 20:45:53 -0500 Received: by most.weird.com via sendmail with stdio id for rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu; Thu, 6 Mar 1997 20:45:47 -0500 (EST) (Smail-3.2.0.93-pre 1997-Mar-5 #11 built 1997-Mar-5) Message-Id: Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 20:45:47 -0500 From: woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) To: Bengt.Kleberg@ms.uab.ericsson.se (Bengt Kleberg) Cc: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu Subject: Re: RC => POSIX In-Reply-To: Bengt Kleberg's message of "Thu, March 6, 1997 05:16:15 -0500" regarding "RC => POSIX" id <199703061016.LAA26568@uabx01c184.uab.ericsson.se> References: <199703061016.LAA26568@uabx01c184.uab.ericsson.se> Reply-To: woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) X-Mailer: ViewMail (vm) Version 5.96 (beta) with GNU Emacs 19.34.1 (m68k.68881-sun-sunos4.1.1, X toolkit) of Thu Sep 12 1996 on most Organization: Planix, Inc.; Toronto, Ontario; Canada [ On Thu, March 6, 1997 at 05:16:15 (-0500), Bengt Kleberg wrote: ] > Subject: RC => POSIX > > What if we wrote rc to posix (or UNIX(tm) if posix isn't enough) and > removed as much of the #ifdef's as possible. Then, on systems without > posix support, we could create a posix library for that operating > system. Only covering the missing posix calls that rc uses, ofcourse. It would be far more productive and result in a far more portable product to integrate GNU Autoconf et al and didn't I just see a note about es being autoconf'ed pass by here earlier? Taking the autoconf support from es should be trivial, esp. to any rc-internals programmer with any experience using autoconf. The GNU Autoconf philosophy is similar in some ways to what you suggest, esp. in that autoconf'ed packages usually provide a compatability library for those system functions the software uses but which are not always available on all systems. However the autoconf style isn't anywhere nearly so restrictive as porting directly to plain POSIX would be. (BTW, w.r.t. the GNU readline signal problems, my adivce is don't use GNU readline -- it isn't very good at what it does, is far too big, and is very difficult to integrate into a program that tries to do job control. There were other command-line editing libraries for rc long ago, and there are other new ones too that might be tried. I've had good luck with the command-line editing support in pdksh and it seems to integrate well with a shell, and it supports both vi and emacs modes.) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP robohack!woods Planix, Inc. ; Secrets of the Weird