[net.unix] AT&Ts Writers Workbench and Documenters Workbench

gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (12/08/84)

> Has anyone has been successful in taking the source code for
> these software packages (written for System V, release 2)
> and compiling it under 4.1 or 4.2?  Does it all work under
> the BRL 4.2/Sys V package?

I now distribute DWB as part of the BRL UNIX System V emulation for 4.2BSD,
so, yes, it works..  However, I have not yet adapted di10 to work with our
particular brand of spooling and Imagen software.

Don't know about WWB, but in general applications written for UNIX System
V work under the BRL emulation if they do not rely on: FIFOs, messages,
semaphores, shared memory, "sxt" multiplexed devices, obscure terminal
handler features such as VMIN, administrative utilities, or the format of
output from highly system-dependent utilities such as "ps".  Any directory
scanning has to be converted to use the new BSD-compatible access routines
which I added to the C library.  Hard-wired pathnames usually need to be
changed, and shell scripts should start with #!/usr/5bin/sh and explicitly
set PATH=/usr/5bin.  This sounds like a large amount of incompatibility,
but in practice importing UNIX System V software is pretty easy.