Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!pacbell!hoptoad!gnu From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Status of V1.3 Message-ID: <4530@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 11 May 88 10:39:27 GMT References: <709@ast.cs.vu.nl> Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco Lines: 52 Does the anticipated Minix V1.3 have working serial ports? Since it has compress and uu**code, it should have atob/btoa too. They are distributed with compress; they encode binary data as text in less space than uu**code. They're small and simple and you can get them from any comp.sources.unix archive. The compress documentation should say that it's a 12-bit compress (if it is), not the standard 16-bit compress. A much better file(1) command is in the comp.sources.unix archives, written by Ian Darwin. The super fast James Woods grep/fgrep/egrep from comp.sources.unix should be supplied, too. Patch(1) by Larry Wall should be supplied rather than the "fix" program, which goes nuts if you have edited the file being patched. A real version of tar(1) should be included, e.g. one that uses the same arguments as v7 tar. Mine is in comp.sources.unix. Has anyone retrofitted the Berkeley TCP/IP networking code recently posted? :-) Or even Phil Karn's stuff, which already runs on MSDOS IBM PC's? I might suggest that just reading the index to comp.sources.unix and obtaining anything that looks like a PD reimplementation of a Unix command is likely to produce a much more functional Minix. The c.s.u code was written by and for people on real Unix systems, and was edited by good moderators, so it is usually as useful as real Unix code, unlike much of Minix. Bring the standard library up to snuff so that it can compile the average 1988 program posted to the net, e.g. all the string functions, (Henry Spencer in comp.sources.unix again), both BSD and SV bcopy/memcpy, the Posix directory access routines, etc. Reading the ANSI C and Posix draft standards might show some places to touch up. Of course you aren't going to have an ANSI C compiler (until gcc is ported to the Atari) but you could at least provide the library routines and include files defined by the standards. Upgrade the C Preprocessor to handle #if defined() and other things. ANSI C would be best of course. There are two working ANSI C Preprocessors available free in source (gnu and decus). Porting my tar to Minix involved writing execlp(), bcmp(), bzero(), 3 arg open. Small may be beautiful, but small and broken is ugly. -- John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com "Use the Source, Luke...."