On 27 April 2005 at 13:41, Neil W Rickert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The real problem here is that recent nmh "development" has been in
> the form of creeping featurism. But the code base is rotten to the
> core, and badly needs revamping and modernizing. Some documenting
> would also be in order.
As a long time user of MH (I still have Jerry Peek's 1st edition of the
classic MH & Xmh), I've ported it to several exotic Unix platforms when
I've needed to. Never could figure out who to get the code changes back
to - and of course now they're gone :-(
Recently attemped to port 1.1RC2 to QNX Neutrino 6.2. Why you ask?
For lack of anything better to do at the time :-) Unfortunately, nmh
doesn't port easily to non-Unix systems, even those that provide a POSIX
compliant API set. My biggest hurdle, which lead to my abandonment of
the porting effort, was the fact that the code uses intimate knowledge
of stdio.h. More specifically, m_getfld.c, is full of porting issues:
/*
This routine "knows" that struct FILEs have a _ptr
and a _cnt to describe the current state of the buffer and
it knows that _filbuf ignores the _ptr & _cnt and simply fills
the buffer. If stdio on your system doesn't work this way, you
may have to make small changes in this routine.
*/
And trying to map QNX's FILE definition to that used by nmh became
too much of a nightmare.
As a question, is it worth attempting to abstract this out, so this
particular pitfall doesn't exist in the future? It would make porting
nmh to non-Unix systems significantly easier in the future. Several
times I have thought about it - and even posted to what I thought was
the right place to get on this list - only to never receive a response...
>
> -NWR
jerry
// Jerry Heyman | "Software is the difference between
// Amiga Forever :-) | hardware and reality"
\\ // [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
\X/
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