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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!umd5.umd.edu!roissy.umd.edu!mark From: mark@roissy.umd.edu (Mark Sienkiewicz) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.apps Subject: Re: 386BSD versions of sources... Date: 26 Aug 1993 14:50:58 GMT Organization: University of Maryland Lines: 41 Message-ID: <25iiki$m9a@umd5.umd.edu> References: <CCB4ru.7K@sugar.NeoSoft.COM> <2179@foxim.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: roissy.umd.edu In article <2179@foxim.nl> rvh@foxim.nl (Roland van Hout) writes: >From article <CCB4ru.7K@sugar.NeoSoft.COM>, by peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva): >> There used to be an archive of ports of net.software to 386BSD, on ref. I >> can't find any such archive on lamp or freefall. Where should I be looking? >> I need: >> C News >I want to know where I can find a C News for 386bsd too! I built plain CNews (or C News or C-News :) for Netbsd 0.8 and it went pretty well. I had to use BASH (Bourne Again Shell, from GNU) to get the configure script to work. I had to tweak it a little bit, but it wasn't much. Most memorable is that the Configure script can't figure out how to run the C preprocessor. When you hack the configure script, search for "cpp". You'll see it trying to run CPP on something and compare the results to what it expected. Just hard code it to use "cc -E" and skip all the testing. I haven't put a serious load on it yet, but local groups work OK. *flame on* CONFIGURE SCRIPTS CONSIDERED HARMFUL ------------------------------------ A lot of people think they are doing us a big favor by send a shell script named "Configure" along with their program. This script allegedly figures out everything the program needs to know about the machine you are installing on, but oddly enough, the instructions usually tell you the *check*the*output* from the configure script. The problem happens when you port to a new machine. I find the same problems on Netbsd and HPUX-- configure scripts tend to get confused. Probably because it is hard to write a program for a machine you have never seen. OK, so now instead of changing a bunch of parameters in an include file or a makefile, I have to figure out what the configure script is doing wrong and fix it. Or maybe I can guess what the last 75% of the configure script would have done, had it actually run instead of bombing on the first problem. *flame off*