blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) (05/20/89)
In article <934@twwells.uucp> bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes: >Most code that doesn't quite work on varying machines, in spite of >effort to make it portable, seems to have the defect of having system >dependencies scattered throughout the code. What large programs (> 250 kbyte) programs have you distributed on the net that have been installed on a wide variety of operating systems (at least half a dozen, counting unix as two with many sub-variations and cross-breeds) that makes you an expert? There a lot of strange bugs out there in the real world. I suppose expecting a mostly bug-free C compiler could be considered a system dependency, but somehow most of my code depends on it. Most of the bug fix contributions to mg 2a were to get it working on a variety of system V systems. (System V: consider it a maze of twisty little passages, all different.) Since I don't run mg under Sys V, I've just stored them away until someone else wants to sort them out. The work of organizing the extencive beta testing of mg is the main reason there hasn't been a 2b or 3a version yet. (Other than the kill buffer code, distributed as a fix to 2a, I've not done much work to mg since 2a.) Bob Larson Arpa: blarson@skat.usc.edu Uucp: {uunet,cit-vax}!usc!skat!blarson Prime mailing list: info-prime-request%ais1@ecla.usc.edu usc!ais1!info-prime-request