Subject: Re: Is there a new tcsh source
To: Gerd Truschinski <gt@prosun.first.gmd.de>
From: Ken Hornstein <kenh@entropic.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/10/1994 01:23:04
>I have some problems with my old tcsh. It didn't know 'cd ~gt'
>It say user gt unknown. But the rest of the system know me. There seems
>to be also some problems with the 'newlib-1.6' form Cygnus. I can't
>configure it proper. 

The new tcsh (6.05) works pretty well; there is one small problems in regards
to it not doing the timeout correctly for a gethostbyaddr() call, but other
than that it works pretty well.  You can do a "set" to list all your shell
variables; one of those will show your tcsh version.

I don't know what newlib-1.6 is; if it's from Cygnus, I would expect it to
use autoconf, which I've never had a problem running under NetBSD; can you
give us more information?

>BTW, is ther now a ftpserver with all the pakages configured for NetBSD?
>Or did we still relay on the Linux and FreeBSD stuff.

Well, personally I don't 'rely' on the Linux and FreeBSD packages; I just grab
stuff off the net, and 70% of the time it works without any changes (one
example of this was Motif 1.2.3, except I didn't grab this off the net :-) ).
25% of the time I have to fix a few problems: they generally fall into one of
two categories:

- Stuff is not pulled in from header files correctly; just need to change the
  header files that are #included.

- People have their own prototypes for system calls or library variables (one
  common example of this is sys_errlist[]).  This is just bad programming;
  deleting the offending prototypes solves this problem.

The other 5% of the time you need to do some work; this can be fairly easy to
relatively hard (top is an example of a hard one, but someone's already done
the tough part :-) ).

Core team members have stated in the past that they prefer to have you send
your diffs back to the author so they can incorporate them into the next
release of their software.  I agree with this, because it becomes a large
burden to maintain a software collection over time (it can get stale very
quickly).  Can you point to some software that you had trouble configuring for
NetBSD, with some specific explanations of what went wrong?  (Saying "I
couldn't configure it proper" is not quite specific enough, sorry :-) ).

--Ken