Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 12:01:06 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii To: Nate Eldredge cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, demmer AT LSTM DOT Ruhr-UNI-Bochum DOT De, nedu AT ee DOT washington DOT edu, mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk Subject: Re: Suggestion: Portability section for libc docs In-Reply-To: <199802110533.VAA06002@adit.ap.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Nate Eldredge wrote: > This is a good idea; however it requires that we look at all the other DOS > compilers. In principle, yes. But in practice, all of the ``other'' DOS compilers mimic what Microsft C does (that's what their notion of portability is). So if you have seen one, you've seen them all. > This is a bit of a dilemma. It does seem out of place to describe other > platforms in DJGPP documentation. Also, actually finding all these > differences is a nightmare. This is easy: what we don't find, won't be described. I submit that we will wind up only mentioning differences which people remember because they had to debug subtle problems. And that is all I suggested. > Otherwise, we end up saying things like "Watcom's `stat' doesn't fill in the > `st_link' field" ad nauseum, Why ad nauseum? It will only be mentioned in the docs for `stat' and `fstat'. > Like for `fork', it would IMHO not be inappropriate to > say, "On Unix systems, this function actually works". How does that sound? This is already in the docs (in reverse: it says that in DJGPP it does NOT work). > I believe Linux is a fairly good > mix of the characteristics of various Unices, If someone has information > about a specific system, that would of course be helpful. Actually, I think Linux is not such a good representative at all. It is only a Unix work-alike, and it tends to the SysV family. The other large family is BSD, which is very different from Linux, AFAIK. > One other question: Would it be better to move this discussion/project to > `djgpp-workers'? IMHO, yes.