Re: [Tack-devel] ACK compiles on NetBSD-macppc, sort of...

[Perry E. M. <pe...@pi...>]

"Gregory T. (tim) Kelly" <gt...@di...> writes:
> At 10:53 PM -0400 7/19/06, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>>I'm happy to interpret error messages and/or help make things build
>>under NetBSD. It should be fairly straightforward -- I would guess
>>most issues are caused by the fact that the current NetBSD compilers
>>are fairly strict.
>
> This is greatly appreciated.  What I am finding is the primary
> reasons ACK isn't compiling is due to changes from BSD 4.2 to BSD
> 4.4 (outside of the cdefs.h issue).  So far it's been a difference
> in off_t (from a long to uint64_t)

You should structure things so that ACK doesn't know what the type of
off_t is -- different platforms have it different lengths. This is
pretty straightforward to do, and POSIX conforming code does not need
to know what length it is in general.

> and a deprecated function call (ftime, replaced by gettimeofday),

It is in libcompat, but in general, you should make things stick to
the lowest common denominator of modern POSIX. getttimeofday is
available on just about everything.

>>BTW, the right thing medium term is to make ACK into a pkgsrc package.
>
> This is probably reasonable, since as far as I know pkgsrc has been
> ported to all of the BSDs.

And Linux, and Solaris, and Irix, and Interix (aka "Services for Unix"
on Windows) and everything else you can imagine.

> I'm still trying to put the pieces together, but I think one step
> that will initially prevent usability on BSD is going to be the
> lack of an ack.out -> elf linker/converter.  It took me a day or
> two to realize ack.out is not a.out, but then again I'm a little
> slow on the uptake.

Well, this is an assembler issue, right? It should be straightforward
to generate ELF instead of other formats. You pretty much *need* ELF
on all modern platforms -- Linux and all the rest use ELF too. You
probably also need to be able to properly embed debugging symbols...

Perry