tsf@druxn.UUCP (FisherTS) (11/16/85)
A 1,000 humble apologies for all the trouble that sigsave booboo
caused the 3b2 folks. Someone actually reported this, and I dropped
the ball. That -1 in signal(-1, 1); makes no sense at all (sigsave.c).
It should have been fixed in 1.1. As for why symbols aren't used..
that's merely because the decompiler wasn't aware of symbolic
values, and the ones that are there were put there by hand.
If 4.2 and SysV have the same header and symbols for signals, then
it's a good idea to fix up sigsave that way. I'll fix it in 1.2.
For you 3b2'ers out there, be sure to change that -1.
In general, sigsave and sigrest have been ignored, and maybe 1.2
will address signal handling a bit better.
As for the floating point quirk of the 3b2s.. I'm not sure how to
handle this one. Maybe I could add something to the README file?
Is the final load supposed to be:
$(CC) -o target -f objects... libs...
If this is accurate, I could put it in the README.
The job of combining the 6 modules (emp[123457]) into one was done by
eagle!mjs. He modified empdis.c in a way that assigned all the commands
to emp1. Neat solution. He did it conditionally so that the folks
with 16-bit machines wouldn't be out in the cold cruel world. I'll
include that in 1.2.
The directory structure may look a bit bizarre, but there is actually
a rationale behind it. It is a structure that is very useful in large
software projects (especially with multiple machine targets), and
it's perhaps a bit of overkill for empire. I'm fond of it ('cause
I work with it every day in the *real* world), and I'll claim artistic
license and keep it the way it is for this hobby of mine (the *non-real*
world). I'm worried that the distribution might not have created the
empty directories though. I should check to see if tar creates those
directories. I thought it would create the whole directory structure.
In any case, having the makefiles compensate for the missing directories
would be a neat solution. Consider it done in Version 1.2.
I'm hoping that Version 1.2 won't be a big deal, and I'll be able to
shar it up and post here.
Someone reported that the manual page shell command (MAN.CCL ?) doesn't
work with the Korn shell. I'll believe anything people say about the
stuff in INFO; I didn't even look at most of the stuff in there.
Someone reported that they could get all the resources they wanted by
using exchange sectors. Now this one I'm really interested in. Anyone
out there know how to do this?? So far the report is lacking details,
but I'm eagerly awaiting those details so we can get it fixed.
A friend who did the original decompilation of empire.c back in 1980,
fixed a bug that allowed a person to log into a country with the same
uid twice using two different terminals. I'm pretty sure I broke that
fix when I hardcoded the ttyn function to always return 1. I compromised
that code when trying to port it to several machines and UNIX variants.
It seems to be percolating up to the top of the priority list, so that
might be fixed in 1.2.
One last thing.. I tried to check out the Old Empire Visual Empire
tool on 4.2 bsd last night. The system I was on didn't have getopt(3),
termio.h, strspn(3), and it didn't appear to have yacc or lex libraries
(liby.a and libl.a). Ugh. Other than that, everything was fine ...
I can get around the termio.h with no regrets, and I can get around
the getopt and strspn problems (boo), but I'll have to get my 4.2
expert to help me find those libraries.
Tom Fisher ihnp4!druxn!tsf