ditroff on sun4

Jaap Akkerhuis jaap+ at andrew.cmu.edu
Wed Jan 3 03:50:28 AEST 1990


Excerpts from netnews.comp.text.desktop: 1-Jan-90 ditroff on sun4 Tom
Gorodecki at taux01.UUC (410)


> Hello .
> My ditroff does not work on sun4 machine .
> I have the DWB source . Are there any patches available to make it
> work on sun4 ? or, is there any version of ditroff that works on sun4 ?


The problem is caused by the fact that ditroff has it's own (scaled down
version) of the stdio library. This causes grief on the sun 4 (and
others RISC machines as the MIPS as well), due to the varargs stuff,
which is now done in a trivial way.

So what to do? Well, use an ``official'' version of varargs to deal with
the built in stdio library. That might get you going.

Alternatively, remove the builtin stdio and just use whatever sun gives
you. This method has the advantage that it will also work on other
processors, but the disadvantage that it requires some more work to get
it right. For instance, since the standard stdio lib uses malloc, troff
cannot use sbrk() anymore. Also, to keep .pi etc. working, one has to
change some stuff as well. To get it right will probably take a couple
of days, as experience learns, and (quite) some knowledge about the
inner workings of troff.

	jaap



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