[HECnet] DECnet on 4.3BSD/TOPS-20 and other questions

[Cory Smelosky]

On Oct 22, 2012, at 4:51 PM, Jason Stevens <neozeed at gmail.com> wrote:


On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
Was anyone ever crazy enough to try to implement any DECnet bits for 4.3BSD?

I doubt it was very highly demanded, thus the "crazy" bit. I'd consider trying to implement it myself, but I don't know C, BSD internals, or in-depth DECnet info and the craziest I've done is gotten a crippled Perl 5 built on Quasijarus. (while i'm on that topic, anyone ever manage to build autoconf/automake on 4.3BSD?) My eventual end goal is to build irssi on 4.3BSD and ignoring the fact it's pretty much impossible.

I've just built the old ircII stuff... and that was involved to say the least.   the University of  Wisconsin version of 4.3 BSD seemed more usable as its got some SUN magic in there like NFS and various other cleanups ...  

I haven't looked at irssi as I'd imagine it'd be ... involved.   

Very involved. I need to get a newer shell to build pkg-config or pkgconf (pkg-config compatible thing, probably easier to use it) so I can get glib built. But I doubt pkg-config will ever build., so the plan stops there unfortunately   

It seems GNU configure scripts are..picky about shells. They hate pdksh, tcsh, proper ksh, and it seems pkgconf needs a modern bash.

I've tried to build several shells   as of yet no luck. Seems sys/time.h needs a bit of work for the history functions of bash3 to build. Maybe I can backport that from FreeBSD? Probably too many dependencies for that. I managed to get locale.h and sys/cdefs.h ported back to build with older GCC, i don't trust it but it built :-).

But it would probably be a bit easier on a different 4.3BSD flavour.