Date: Tue, 2 May 95 11:21:10 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: nate@trout.sri.MT.net (Nate Williams) Cc: julian@freefall.cdrom.com, hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: policy with sources imported.. Message-ID: <9505021721.AA07795@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199505020327.VAA04068@trout.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at May 1, 95 09:27:05 pm
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> > I did notice a distinct lack of portability for things like tcsh > > and telnetd, though; I would think it would be a goal to make sure > > that the code didn't get "deportablized" as it was imported > > I don't think that's a worthy goal. I think it's more important to make > sure that the sources are readable and maintainable on the BSD box that > it's used for than to shoot for spaghetti code full of #ifdefs which > make it compile under every other OS. This is probably true for sources maintained by the FreeBSD Project. I would claim that it's *not* true of sources imported from external maintainers on a vendor branch (well, they *should* be on a vendor branch). > >-- I > > was really suprised at some of the things that wouldn't build for SunOS. > > After using Ultrix for years, and then FreeBSD, I find that it is > difficult to compile code for SunOS simply because the stock compiler > doesn't support prototypes, and when you use something like gcc which > does support prototypes there are *way* too many missing and/or bogus > prototypes. I was using acc; however, I have argued for prototype protection but not declaration of functions using __STDC__ to wrapper the prototypes to get around the problem you are complaining about (and VOLATILE instead of volatile and CONST instead of const, and a couple of rather minor sets of #defines for cdefs.h for varargs). Clearly the best argument for prototyping is C++ compilation of C code. I guess that the desirability of this is related to whether or not you believe that C++ will be the successor to C. 8-). > I'm trying to do C++ development on my SunOS box, and I'm having a heck > of a time getting things to work because everything under the Sun (gag) > is screwed up. I could use a really old version of Lucid-C which > provides prototyped include files, but it's fairly buggy so I'm trying > to stick with gcc. The C++ compiler on Sun from SunSoft and the CFront translator from AT&T both work fine on Sun. The CFront code actually can output non protoype K&R style code, which is then portable to other machines. I think the problems you ae having are probably all header file related, and that only because the gcc/g++ header file rewriting hasn't been adequately maintained. Oh, the Oregon Software C++ works fine, too. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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