Re: Minix support, part 1

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Thomas,

> Recently, in
> the past month or so, Minix has replaced it's C library with a port of
> the NetBSD C Library. Many function prototypes and definitions have
> changed.

Nice to hear that. The current Minix libc was lacking a lot of functions,
from copysign() to yn().

When working on a libc like that, be sure to periodically test it against
the gnulib testsuite. Gnulib's testsuite checks against many (simple or
complicated) bugs in POSIX functions. The way to run it is

$ ./gnulib-tool --create-testdir --dir=/tmp/testdir --with-tests 
--single-configure \
                `./posix-modules`
$ cd /tmp/testdir
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check

> A lot of work arounds are no longer needed.

Good, I will limit my workarounds to those that can be useful for other
platforms as well.

Will sizeof(long double) be increased, or will it stay the same as
sizeof(double)?

> Also, the system compiler cc
> (ACK) is going to be removed eventually.

Makes sense. Given the problems with 'long long' and with array types
(see the other mail, title "Re: Minix support, part 2"), there are not
many packages that you can compile with this compiler. Also, it is
insane to have two different formats of .o files and of .a files on
the same system.

> Also note, to get the
> right functions and definitions included, you should have CPPFLAGS set
> to "-D_NETBSD_SOURCE -D_MINIX -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_COMPAT_MINIX" and
> LDADD set to "-lcompat_minix -lminlib"

Please revisit these choices. Autoconfiguring packages only set _MINIX
and _POSIX_SOURCE, because that's in Autoconf for many years. Any change
here takes ca. 5 years until it has been rolled out to users and people
have created new packages with these new Autoconf versions.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Jean Jaurès <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jaurès>