First of all, this was posted as a SGI news. Secondly, why should you decide which Linux news is interesting? I find this news item the most interesting on/. today.
As a little rant over Freshmeat is that they tend to post changes in software X v 0.1.x from author Y. Author Y is probably going to dump development in a couple of months since his interest in further developing the software has disappeared.
/. is Linux centric accept that or go somewhere else.
I would call it a Trojan. One of the purposes of a virus is to spread itself. This would have been detected the first time someone did a make install. If it instead infected all Makefiles on your system with itself I would call it a virus.
Actually, I've been told that the GDB version from RedHat have a special patch for gdb that makes threads work on x86. I remember that I once dissected the gdb source rpm and tried to apply the threads patch. Unfortunately, I couldn't apply the patch. Other people, on the Debian mailing list said that threads should work if I changed from using the normal libc6 to the debug version of libc6. Well it didn't work either and consumed another 8M of precious RAM.
How well does GDB work in RedHat 6.2? The problems with the gdb included in Debian Potato is: 1. It doesn't work with threads. 2. Starting an application with many debugged shared libraries is awfully slow. 3. Stepping into function-calls in shared libraries with C++ doesn't always work. 4. gdb can't remember breakpoints in shared libraries between runs.
All in all I find gdb pretty unusable. I know that several people disagree with me but I tried several advice to get it working better. gdbinit tweaking, changing to a libc6-debug version and gdb patches. But nothing has worked to fully satisfactory so far.
I have payed my bills Online for two years and I can't live without it. No more forgetting last day of payment or go to the post-office. Privacy concerns? Well, then you have to stop using VISA also since they track that also. Security? Well, I have a special box (looks like a pocket calculator) which generates new unique passwords every time it is used. Fortify fixes 128-bit encryption in Netscape.
And for almost a year, I also do online trading. Yeah, viva internet. But I have stopped sending my VISA-number over the net unless the company that receives the number promises that they don't save my VISA-number in a database.
My bed or couch seems much more comfortable than reading in front of the screen. But I will give it a second try when a Crusoe powered electronic book/webboard is available.
Unfortunately, this means bad news for the two swedish adventurers Ola Skinnarmo and Göran Kropp which currently are skiing towards the north pole. No more reports from them then. I hope they have some other ways of communicate with the rest of the world.
I don't understand what you mean with overkill. The other stuff in Cygwin doesn't hurt you, does it? Another serious thing with Cygwin is that you only can create GPL software.
There is a compiler called gcc-mingw32 available for Win32, which have removed the dependencies to the Cygwin dll. But I don't know if this compiler is supported anymore by anyone.
So I downloaded this compiler and installed it. No problems installing it. Then I wanted to try to compile a simple application: bcc32 deque.cpp bcc32 couldn't find the include directories. Went to documentation, great no documentation of the compiler switches. But anyway, I found that it was -I just as in gcc.
Hmm added them: bcc32 -Id:\Borland\BCC55\Include deque.cpp Couldn't find the algorithm include file. Looked in the Include directory and found algorith.h. Super, so much for ANSI C++.
Downloaded SGI STL, which should compile with BC 5.02. No luck there, but noticed that the _BORLANDC_ settings in stl_config.h must radically change, since BC5.5 better supports ANSI C++. But I got to a grinding halt when I got duplicated entries of __STD and basic_string in the stddef.h file for Borland. Duh, stddef.h shouldn't contain any C++ specific things.
If they brag so much about their ANSI C++ conformance, how is it that they can't use the official SGI STL? And why does the STL included with BC5.5 not have ANSI C++ file names.
I will give it another try, but they could at least have documented the compiler switches.
Well I don't care much about the IDE. XEmacs is ported to Windows, and that is enough for me (but the compile mode only understands the output of gcc so no nice browsing through compiling errors is not possible). And Mozilla doesn't use MFC so that is not a problem. But unfortunately the build system is not as flexible in Windows as in UNIX. It requires you to use nmake. nmake is distributed with MSVC. So the first step would be to convert the build system to use GNU make instead. And I don't think that the Netscape employees are too happy with patches changing the build system when the first Beta is closing in.
But it could be a great project for after the release.
Well, but it does matter. A freebeer compiler is better than nothing. Some of us contribute to project such as Mozilla which is available on Windows. Good luck making your changes in Linux and breaking stuff on Windows. Now I can use a Windows compiler on my home computer instead of buying an expensive Visual Studio license.
BC5 (at least 5.01 and 5.02) did support namespaces. And VC6 still doesn't support ANSI C++. I.e., try to compile this in Visual (which compiles in BC5):
void ansicpp() { for (int i = 0; i 10; i++); for (int i = 0; i 10; i++); }
Not to mention the worthless support for STL in VC6.
As I remember (since I have switched to VC++ a couple of years ago) the dll's aren't compatible with each other. First of all you need to use the tool implib to convert your dll's back and forth. Then I remember that struct alignment is different in Borland and Visual C++ so you may have to change the struct alignment (6 in VC and 1 or 2 in BC++) on the particular files. But this only applies to BC 5.02, so they may have changed that in the 5.5 version. There are probably more problems, which I have forgotten right now.
A zip-file is just an equivalent of.tar.gz on Linux so I don't understand the comparison. And you know, InstallShield is just a nice GUI above a inferior installing system.
In fact, Windows is moving towards something similar to deb and rpm packages in W2K where they have a new system Windows Installer. I can't tell much about it yet, but I'm going learn how it works and hopefully our company can dump the inferior InstallShield scripts.
Actually, I think that deb works pretty good already. It's just that the user friendliness of installing deb packages could improve. I like apt-get, but a regular Windows user would be horrified with the CLI.
Binding your *real* code to a specific GUI is bad. It will stop you from porting to other GUIs, CLI and to platforms where your GUI isn't supported.
But I find it equally stupid to make a CLI interface and make a GUI wrapper. It will require that you build a parser and maybe even a whole script language for using the tool.
My point is that you either make a shared library or a COM object from which you then use from your GUI or CLI.
E.g., I would like a gdb or cvs shared library to be able to make faster and more sophisticated GUIs around these tools.
I have still failed to see the greatness of LISP. Since I prefer Emacs as editor I can do very simple things, such as editing my.emacs but not much more.
OK, someone with experience with LISP and e.g. ML (or any other functional language), explain why RMS and others call LISP a superior language? When I studied CS we learned ML and I thought that was a brilliant language. Perl on the other hand is superior when it comes to manipulating text.
Personnally I think that Linux should be ported to more systems. A solution could be to split the tar-balls into separate systems.
Regarding patches, I have not downloaded a full tar-ball since pre-2.2.0 something, applying patches is easy. You only need to do a 'make clean' and 'make oldconfig', which is far more faster than reconfiguring your system every time you upgrade the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, this was posted as a SGI news. Secondly, why should you decide which Linux news is interesting? I find this news item the most interesting on /. today.
As a little rant over Freshmeat is that they tend to post changes in software X v 0.1.x from author Y. Author Y is probably going to dump development in a couple of months since his interest in further developing the software has disappeared.
/. is Linux centric accept that or go somewhere else.
> install: rm -rf /
> Is this not a virus?
I would call it a Trojan. One of the purposes of a virus is to spread itself. This would have been detected the first time someone did a make install. If it instead infected all Makefiles on your system with itself I would call it a virus.
Actually, I've been told that the GDB version from RedHat have a special patch for gdb that makes threads work on x86. I remember that I once dissected the gdb source rpm and tried to apply the threads patch. Unfortunately, I couldn't apply the patch. Other people, on the Debian mailing list said that threads should work if I changed from using the normal libc6 to the debug version of libc6. Well it didn't work either and consumed another 8M of precious RAM.
How well does GDB work in RedHat 6.2? The problems with the gdb included in Debian Potato is:
1. It doesn't work with threads.
2. Starting an application with many debugged shared libraries is awfully slow.
3. Stepping into function-calls in shared libraries with C++ doesn't always work.
4. gdb can't remember breakpoints in shared libraries between runs.
All in all I find gdb pretty unusable. I know that several people disagree with me but I tried several advice to get it working better. gdbinit tweaking, changing to a libc6-debug version and gdb patches. But nothing has worked to fully satisfactory so far.
OpenGroup has set up a standard called UNIX98:
http://www.opengroup.org/prods/xxm0.htm
Interestingly, Linux is not a fully compliant UNIX system as you might think.
I have payed my bills Online for two years and I can't live without it. No more forgetting last day of payment or go to the post-office. Privacy concerns? Well, then you have to stop using VISA also since they track that also. Security? Well, I have a special box (looks like a pocket calculator) which generates new unique passwords every time it is used. Fortify fixes 128-bit encryption in Netscape.
And for almost a year, I also do online trading. Yeah, viva internet. But I have stopped sending my VISA-number over the net unless the company that receives the number promises that they don't save my VISA-number in a database.
My bed or couch seems much more comfortable than reading in front of the screen. But I will give it a second try when a Crusoe powered electronic book/webboard is available.
Unfortunately, this means bad news for the two swedish adventurers Ola Skinnarmo and Göran Kropp which currently are skiing towards the north pole. No more reports from them then. I hope they have some other ways of communicate with the rest of the world.
Glibc 2.1.3 is on my Potato system so I see no need of complaining.
I have found that Netscape works much better with this libc than 2.1.2. No mysterious crashes when closing Netscape windows.
The following code was in _stddef.h for BCC:
#ifdef __cplusplus
#define __STD std::
#else
#define __STD
#endif
This makes it hard to work with SGI STL, which defines __STD as "std" or nothing.
stddef.h also have some forwarded basic_string classes, which differs from the ones in SGI STL.
This will make it extremly hard to use SGI STL, unless Borland accept patches for their include files.
I don't understand what you mean with overkill. The other stuff in Cygwin doesn't hurt you, does it? Another serious thing with Cygwin is that you only can create GPL software.
There is a compiler called gcc-mingw32 available for Win32, which have removed the dependencies to the Cygwin dll. But I don't know if this compiler is supported anymore by anyone.
So I downloaded this compiler and installed it. No problems installing it. Then I wanted to try to compile a simple application:
bcc32 deque.cpp
bcc32 couldn't find the include directories. Went to documentation, great no documentation of the compiler switches. But anyway, I found that it was -I just as in gcc.
Hmm added them:
bcc32 -Id:\Borland\BCC55\Include deque.cpp
Couldn't find the algorithm include file. Looked in the Include directory and found algorith.h. Super, so much for ANSI C++.
Downloaded SGI STL, which should compile with BC 5.02. No luck there, but noticed that the _BORLANDC_ settings in stl_config.h must radically change, since BC5.5 better supports ANSI C++. But I got to a grinding halt when I got duplicated entries of __STD and basic_string in the stddef.h file for Borland. Duh, stddef.h shouldn't contain any C++ specific things.
If they brag so much about their ANSI C++ conformance, how is it that they can't use the official SGI STL? And why does the STL included with BC5.5 not have ANSI C++ file names.
I will give it another try, but they could at least have documented the compiler switches.
Well I don't care much about the IDE. XEmacs is ported to Windows, and that is enough for me (but the compile mode only understands the output of gcc so no nice browsing through compiling errors is not possible). And Mozilla doesn't use MFC so that is not a problem.
But unfortunately the build system is not as flexible in Windows as in UNIX. It requires you to use nmake. nmake is distributed with MSVC. So the first step would be to convert the build system to use GNU make instead. And I don't think that the Netscape employees are too happy with patches changing the build system when the first Beta is closing in.
But it could be a great project for after the release.
Well, but it does matter. A freebeer compiler is better than nothing. Some of us contribute to project such as Mozilla which is available on Windows. Good luck making your changes in Linux and breaking stuff on Windows. Now I can use a Windows compiler on my home computer instead of buying an expensive Visual Studio license.
Stupid /., between i and 10 should be a smaller-than sign. (I did submit Plain Old Text)
BC5 (at least 5.01 and 5.02) did support namespaces. And VC6 still doesn't support ANSI C++. I.e., try to compile this in Visual (which compiles in BC5):
void ansicpp()
{
for (int i = 0; i 10; i++);
for (int i = 0; i 10; i++);
}
Not to mention the worthless support for STL in VC6.
As I remember (since I have switched to VC++ a couple of years ago) the dll's aren't compatible with each other. First of all you need to use the tool implib to convert your dll's back and forth. Then I remember that struct alignment is different in Borland and Visual C++ so you may have to change the struct alignment (6 in VC and 1 or 2 in BC++) on the particular files. But this only applies to BC 5.02, so they may have changed that in the 5.5 version. There are probably more problems, which I have forgotten right now.
Good work Borland! It will definetly help cross-platform development, such as Mozilla.
;)
It's sad to say but gcc doesn't cut it yet on Windows. IMHO, I wish that RedHat/Cygnus would direct their forces to concentrate on UNIX instead now.
And you others, stop harassing the Borland site, I can't get through at the moment.
FYI, AMD750 is history. VIA has finally produced their KX133 chipset, which among other things allows AGP4X.
People have complained about the inferiour chipset for the Athlons. It's just that picking on the little guy is not what people like to do.
A zip-file is just an equivalent of .tar.gz on Linux so I don't understand the comparison.
And you know, InstallShield is just a nice GUI above a inferior installing system.
In fact, Windows is moving towards something similar to deb and rpm packages in W2K where they have a new system Windows Installer. I can't tell much about it yet, but I'm going learn how it works and hopefully our company can dump the inferior InstallShield scripts.
Actually, I think that deb works pretty good already. It's just that the user friendliness of installing deb packages could improve. I like apt-get, but a regular Windows user would be horrified with the CLI.
Binding your *real* code to a specific GUI is bad. It will stop you from porting to other GUIs, CLI and to platforms where your GUI isn't supported.
But I find it equally stupid to make a CLI interface and make a GUI wrapper. It will require that you build a parser and maybe even a whole script language for using the tool.
My point is that you either make a shared library or a COM object from which you then use from your GUI or CLI.
E.g., I would like a gdb or cvs shared library to be able to make faster and more sophisticated GUIs around these tools.
I have still failed to see the greatness of LISP. Since I prefer Emacs as editor I can do very simple things, such as editing my .emacs but not much more.
:)
OK, someone with experience with LISP and e.g. ML (or any other functional language), explain why RMS and others call LISP a superior language? When I studied CS we learned ML and I thought that was a brilliant language. Perl on the other hand is superior when it comes to manipulating text.
Funny, RMS came up with the POSIX name.
Personnally I think that Linux should be ported to more systems. A solution could be to split the tar-balls into separate systems.
Regarding patches, I have not downloaded a full tar-ball since pre-2.2.0 something, applying patches is easy. You only need to do a 'make clean' and 'make oldconfig', which is far more faster than reconfiguring your system every time you upgrade the kernel.
*drool* I want a KX133 system...
Where have you heard of Jan 2000? All I have heard of is Q1, which can be as late as March.
Sorry for the moderation to flamebait. The scroll wheel played tricks on me. Please moderate this up to 1.