Re: [Tack-devel] MINIX 1.5 and ACK

[<u-...@ae...>]

On Sat, Mar 09, 2019 at 12:08:09AM +0100, David Given wrote:
> That's known as ACKPACK, and it's a special cut-down version of the ACK
> which forked off a while ago. I don't know anything about that one.
> 
> +u...@ae... <u-...@ae...>, you maintain ACKPACK, don't you? Do you
> have a download site for it?
> 
> 
> On Fri, 8 Mar 2019 at 23:59 Christian Groessler <ch...@gr...> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm new here.
> >
> > I've got the MINIX 1.5 distribution (from back then, supporting PC 8086
> > and 80286, and M68K Amiga, Atari, Mac) which includes the source code of
> > most of the system. The notably exception is the source code of the
> > compiler.
> >
> > Is the source code of this version of ACK publicly available?

It would be a challenge to figure out how exactly the compiler binaries
supplied with Minix 1.5 were built. I doubt that this information survived
since then.

Nevertheless, it is possible to rebuild a Minix-specific version of ack,
the so called ackpack. The source is publicly available, even though
not visible very much, because the corresponding package subtree has
been deleted.

My involvement in ackpack is of different kind, it is on ia32 Linux
where I ported ackpack and the Minix-2 standard C library (very handy
as a compact and clean ANSI C environment, with a generous license).

I doubt that you could build/self-host ackpack under Minix-1.x, but
Minix-2 is well suited for this (on ia32, possibly not on i86).

Here follow the pointers to the sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060405092432/http://packages.minix3.org/software/ackpack.tar.bz2

(An almost identical tar file used to be available at
 https://web.archive.org/web/20090706093854/http://www.minix3.org/software/ackpack.tar.bz2
but looked missing today, may be just a glitch at archive.org ?
The difference in the contents is only in rcs tags.)

otherwise

https://git.minix3.org/index.cgi?p=bigports.git;a=tree;hb=4b758;h=10b88
(unfortunately snapshots do not seem to be available from there)

otherwise

git clone git://git.minix3.org/bigports
git checkout e2cdd3d778f8003c828ec3aa642ee4669dec77d5

there see the ackpack directory

Hope this helps
Rune