Which 386 UNIX binaries run on which 386 UNIXs ?

[Bob Palowoda]

>From article <1990Sep04.125013.21424 at virtech.uucp>, by cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill):

[to answer the question of why would anyone want to link Xenix obj's to
unix]

> Last year we purchased a copy of the UNIFY/Accell development system for
> Interactive Unix.  Unify had done a port to Xenix System V/386 and when
> one of the marketers there read the UNIX 3.2 release notes that said something
> like "This release includes full compatability with Xenix..." the marketers
> decided to release the Xenix product for Interactive Unix.
> 
> The problem with this is that the C interface libraries did not work (i.e.
> I couldn't compile a C program that used the database).

  Uggh! I can't beleive UNIFY would do something like this without testing
the product. Actually if they did they must have produced nothing but 
"no sales", which inturn cost UNIFY and the customers money.  

> What I did to get around this was to load our dusty xenix 2.3.2 diskettes
> onto a sub-directory of our 386/ix system, chroot to that directory and
> compile the database applications.  However, when my code dropped core, 
> the xenix debugging utilities couldn't read the interactive core file and the
> interactive debugging utilities couldnt read the xenix binaries.

 Actually I tried the same thing with Informix and had about the same results.
What I would really like to see is some sort of OMF <-> COFF conversion 
utility. Or should I say "conversion/tranlation" utility. Or maybe
"conversion/translation/bugfilter" utility. The point is Xenix will 
eventually die off, nobody will want to spend the time doing ifdefs if
they had the tool to do the conversion. I'm not an expert on compiliers,
maybe some of the compiler guru's out there can comment if this can 
be done. 

---Bob
  
> back to the age old (and slow) debugging process of adding printfs through
> the code to find where it was breaking.

  I sometimes wonder if this was the inspiration of vi's macro's.

---Bob

-- 
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