[LispM-Hackers] Who is doing what?

[James A. Crippen]

John Morrison <jm@mak.mak.com> writes:

> (1) Do all the macroinstructions.  Now that we've been able to find the
> first one, this should be reasonably straightforward.
> 
> (2) Concurrently make sure the thing builds on some different
> platforms so that any "can't get there from here on this platform"
> design flaws can be addressed while it's still early:
> 
> (a) Nyef has FreeBSD, right?
> (b) james has a Sparc/Linux box, right?
> (c) Steve has a Solaris box?
> (d) I've got a Linux x86 box
> (e) I've got a Win2K box (w/ mingw)
> (f) I've also got a Win2K box w MSDEV 4 or 5 (I forget)
> (g) At work, I've got access to Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, VxWorks, etc.

I've also got a OpenBSD x86 box and a MacOS X iMac G3.  And a
Symbolics LispM, but I don't think we want to port to that.  I could
possibly have an SGI Indy running Irix 5.2 but I don't have a copy of
Irix right now.

> I am more than happy to be the "porting" guy for the platforms I've
> got access to.  To this end, I've got another 128MB bare-iron x86 box
> I am about to reconfigure here.  I would like to know what I should
> put on it, and what I should do next.  Options include:
> 
> (i) No host OS, and boot via Etherboot (or something like that), and
> cross-compile from Linux.  (I have done this before, and it seems to
> work fine, actually).

This sounds fun.

> (ii) No host OS, but put some different filesystems on it (ext2, ext3,
> FAT16, FAT32), and netboot and debug filesystem implementations

This is just an extension of the above.  Might as well do both
concurrently.

> (iii) A stripped-down (maybe embedded) Linux OS, or maybe one of those
> "boot from a floppy" versions, and then port e3 to either a
> dynamically-loaded kernel module or a TFTP-loadable SVGAlib
> application.  (This will take some exploratory programming.)

I like this idea.  It means less low level OS programming.

> (iv) A boot-from-DOS DOS extender type application.  (This will take
> exploratory programming.)

Ugh.  This is No Fun *and* it relies on a non-free OS.  I don't even
have a copy of DOS around anymore.  I'd have to pirate it to get a
copy.  Not good.

Honestly JM I think that each port should be maintained by whoever has
an appropriate box and is willing to maintain the port.

As far as hacking on macroinstructions, I'm willing to do so, but I'm
not making much progress on it.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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