🚀 go-pugleaf

ggw@wolves.uucp (Gregory G. Woodbury) writes:

>I appreciate the effort put into Zsh, but there is one small complaint
>that I have.

>The package is BSD/SUN specific!

>There is NO indication in the headers or READMEs or anywhere that the
>package requires specific facilities in BSD/SUN Unix'en.

>I went to the effort to get on my internet account and FTP the package,
>and to transfer it via modem to my 88000/System V site and unpack it and
>start to play with it.....

>Only to discover that there are extreme dependencies on BSD and SUN/OS
>type information in the thing.

>Specifically, the references to <sys/resources.h> is not portable, and
>its very difficult to make anything that really uses the winsize
>structure really portable.

>Oh Well.

>Another tool that I went and poked at only to discover that there are
>critical non-portable dependencies not noted in the announcement.
>-- 
>Gregory G. Woodbury @ The Wolves Den UNIX, Durham NC
>UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw   ...mcnc!wolves!ggw           [use the maps!]
>Domain: ggw@cds.duke.edu     ggw%wolves@mcnc.mcnc.org
>[The line eater is a boojum snark! ]           <standard disclaimers apply>

I second the irritation, not with regard to zsh(I have a Sun but I have not
tried the package yet), but with regard to a lot of other packages that I
have downloaded.  I have even tried packages that were supposed to run on
SunOS, but I discovered they would not run on the more SysV'ish later 
versions of SunOS.  I think that all posters of any sourcecode ought to
include complete information on all particulars of hardware and software
configuration of the systems that they have actually brought the package up
on, and the difficulty of configuring for the known good targets, then a list
of suspected or known difficult targets.  This could be put in a file called
AATargets that would show up very early on the manifest and in the shar.
Somehow I would like to have this easily available to people retrieving 
packages by FTP or BBS or UUCP.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                             _________________________________
  R.Stewart (Stew) Ellis                    / _______________________________/
  Assoc. Prof. of Social Science           / /      ______  ____________  __
  Dept. of Humanities & Social Science    / /      /___  / / ___  ___  / / /
  1700 W. Third Avenue                   / /          / / / /  / /  / / / /
  Flint, MI 48504                       / /__________/ / / /  / /  / / / /
  313-762-9765 Office                  /______________/ /_/  /_/  /_/ /_/

  elliss@frith.egr.msu.edu            ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE        

  "Apple Macintosh, the closed system for people with supposedly open minds."
    - plagiarized from someone else on the net
  "How you gonna do it? OS/2 it!" - stupid IBM ad 
  "Have you ever heard anything so half-OSsed?" - me