> 
> 
> > Speaking of contamination...how do you feel about those of us actively
> > working on some portion of a commercial UNIX working on the Sun 3
> > port?  I'm really loathe to write *anything* for NetBSD for fear my
> > involvement with HP-UX would be damaging.
> > 
> > Comments requested!
> 
[...]
> If you are just doing development with a binary distribution of an OS,
> then you have nothing to worry about, except don't lift header
> files.....
It may be sometimes difficult to avoid header files and keep
compatibility, e.g. <a.out.h> or <ioctl.h>. Header files are
public stuff, and it does not make very much sense to reorder
them, but leaving its contents intact, just to get rid of the
copyright. On the other hand, renaming all #defines, structures,
functions to make this "own work", is also bad, because the headers
describe interfaces other software is supposed to use. <stdio.h>
with its non-AT&T FILE structure is an example for incompatibility
introduced.
Even more: I have no access to SunOS source (which is good), but
for writing a device driver I would look at the interface 
already given in the corresponding headers (with the option to
invent a lookalike driver that I could try out in a SunOS Kernel).
The source code of the driver would be (very likely) entirely
different from the original. Sorta like MS-DOS vs. DR-DOS,
the latter presenting the same public interface as the first,
but extremely different in the non-public structures (and some
unofficial INT21 functions).
I have always wondered how to write compatible code at all 
in such a situation. Everyone of us is polluted with knowledge
of structures that couldn't have been hidden by AT&T (because the
old pcc didn't allow precompiled headers) and others.

[...]
> later,
> Adam Glass
> 



-- 
         Dr. Holger Veit                   | INTERNET: Holger.Veit@gmd.de
|  |   / GMD-SET German National Research  | Phone: (+49) 2241 14 2448
|__|  /  Center for Computer Science       | Fax:   (+49) 2241 14 2342
|  | /   Schloss Birlinghoven              | Had a nightmare yesterday:
|  |/    53754 St. Augustin, Germany       | My system started up with
                                           | ... Booting vmunix.el ...

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