Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 16:51:26 -0700
From: jan kok <kok AT CS DOT ColoState DOT EDU>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: porting

Eric Backus <ericb AT lsid DOT hp DOT com> writes
>I have ported many of the FSF utilities to DJGPP on MS-DOS.  My
>impression is that it will be nearly impossible to automate this
>process.
[long list of porting suggestions deleted]

Thank you, Eric, this looks useful.

I agree that it would be "nearly impossible" to totally automate
the process (can you say "undecidable problem" ? :).  I was hoping
that it might be possible to write some scripts to do some of the
more common tasks.  I guess there are two classes of tasks:

1) porting a program for the first time.
2) re-porting, after changes have been made to the original source (e.g.
the current gcc discussion).

For the first, some scripts, such as "rename include file" (which would
edit all the #includes in all the .c files, rename the header file, and
maybe edit the makefile, or remind the person doing the porting (the
porter? :) to do so) might be helpful.

Since the porter will still have to eyeball the code and drive the conversion
process, it might be better to use editor macros of some sort, rather than
awk or whatever.  I've been using demacs for several months and it works
very well for me.  So the scripts could be new emacs commands, written
in emacs lisp.  What do others think of this approach?

For the second task (re-porting), it would be helpful to have the unix
"merge" utility.  Is this available on PCs?

Would Eric or someone care to give me a "homework" assignment, some program,
not too complicated, for me to try to port, in order to get some experience
at porting and to try out Eric's suggestions?

Thanks,
- Jan Kok
kok AT cs DOT colostate DOT edu