questions about porting and reality (was Re: New port - Berkley yacc)

> From: Dave Hudson <dave@humbug.demon.co.uk>
> Date: Thu, 2 Jun 1994 06:20:21 -0400
>
> I've just ported a version of Berkley yacc - I suspect it's not the latest
> one, it just happened to be one I had on my Linux system (the timestamps
> indicate it was April last year).
>
> I think it generates slightly smaller output files than bison, and doesn't
> come with the insistence that all programs using it must be GPL'd.

This is great! (non GPL'd is important to a lot of people)

I'm wondering what the general state of porting is. How many people
are actually using VSTa for production work, as opposed to having fun
hacking on it?

I've been swamped, so haven't installed VSTa yet, but I have a laptop
that is currently running Linux that I am thinking of switching to
VSTa (it only has 120MB of disk and 4MB of ram, so small is good).
Here are the tools I use a lot:
        TeX - should be easy to port, only uses open, close, read,
                write.
        dvi previewer - need access to display as bitplane
        GNUemacs - mg is nice, but I really need shell-mode. Any idea
                what problems there are in porting it? I've thought
                of writing a Xlib fake so I could run lemacs
        scm - (Jaffer's Scheme interpreter) should be easy

I also have a 486DLC that is going to become my main production
machine. I've been tossing around the idea of linux, netbsd and VSTa.
In addition to the above, I'd also need:
        sc - spreadsheet - should be easy except for curses
        uucp - could be somewhat tricky - messes around with keyboard
                modes etc.
        cnews - I can read the news using emacs, but I need to unpack
                it. Should be very easy to port.
        mawk - or equivalent for sysadmin scripts
        network - there's also a couple other machines that will be
                connected to an Ethernet and in the longer term I'd
                need remote file access

I'm willing to put time into getting some of this working. I also
have a NS32532 board (different instruction set, but same byte
ordering) that I want to be running the same operating system (which
is why I'm thinking about netbsd). I guess this would be the first
non Intel architecture - but it's the closest in a lot of ways.

Any ideas? Comments?

Thanks ../Dave
Received on Thu Jun 2 12:32:32 1994