System V -vs- 4.2bsd portability

bob at SU-SHASTA.ARPA bob at SU-SHASTA.ARPA
Fri Aug 10 02:41:43 AEST 1984


Being quite familiar with porting between System V & 4.2bsd, here is my quick
summary of problems:

1. Ioctl() [I have some IFDEFfed code to handle this that I will post to
   net.sources as part of my color curses package soon.]

2. Makefiles. System V's make is more powerful and in going to 4.2bsd they
   will need to be beefed up. In particular, single suffix rules will have to
   be converted to specific dependencies. The built-in rule .sh which copies
   thing.sh to thing for shell scripts (and data files) will also have to be
   changed to specific dependencies.

3. Names of include files containing particular defines and structs have been
   changed to protect the guilty.

4. Use of library routines only available on one of the systems.

5. More significant characters in variable names on 4.2bsd.

6. One musn't scan directories on 4.2bsd the way one does on System V. Lib-
   rary routines are supplied with 4.2bsd to use; versions of the library is
   available for System V.

I suspect #2 will be your main problem in porting writer's workbench.

Bob Toxen
Silicon Graphics
{decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!Shasta!olympus!bob



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