Very interesting. So gcc on VMS is under active development?
Absolutely. My company is working on the IA64 VMS port of GNAT under contract to HP. GNAT as you may know, is the Gnu Ada compiler and Gnu C is required to build the backend. I don't really recommend Gnu C for serious development on VMS, since its not compatible with the standard DEC C header files. Only the ones needed for building GNAT and bootstrapping Gnu C have been ported.
If such information can be made available publicly, One of the projects on my list is to build a GCC 6809 cross complier that runs on OpenVMS. The one that I currently have only works under cygwin.
For example this command:The latter version uses Perl. So far I've run into two problems with the Perl "system" function. One is stderr can't be redirected properly,
Define "properly". What do you want it to do and what does it do instead?
system "$m4 --help </dev/null 2>&1 | grep reload-state >/dev/null";
writes the "help" output to the screen, when it should be going to /dev/null.
That may need to be handled by GNV, or HP C RTL folks as the redirection is being handled by m4, presumably a C program in GNV, not by the Perl system function.
>>>implemented with lib$spawn?another is long command lines don't work. I suspect "system" is
Yes, system is implemented via lib$spawn, so as far as I know, there's no way around DCL command line limits. You can see the implementation in the Perl_do_spawn() function in [.vms]vms.c in the Perl sources.
The line limits are increased in 8.2, do you have access to the pre-release code before the field test?
You may want to contact HP to see if they can give you a backported DCL, if it is possible for it to run on an older version.
I believe that a better solution would be for "system" to look at the program(s) being executed, and if they are CRTL based executables then vfork/exec should be used, otherwise falling back to lib$spawn. This is
what my ports of bash and Gnu make do, and it works quite well.
Are these separate from GNV?
I used to have an anonymous ftp site and some of my Gnu tools for VMS made their way eventually to DEC->Compaq->HP and I think now reside on sourceforge.net. They cleaned up and rewrote the VMS specific piping in bash, and ended up breaking some things. I've sent them a few bug reports but I don't know if they ever got fixed.
As far as I know, the current GNV is: 1.5-6. There is ongoing work on the make application and with pipes.
I think that there is an e-mail contact for feedband on the GNV download page. I do not have time to look for it at the moment.
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-John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Personal Opinion Only
