lq-text installation notes... and teensy weensy core dumps...

[Liam R. E. Quin]

Several people have reported problems installing and/or using lq-text.  Do
not despair -- other people are using it fine -- but these notes might help.

You can get the current version of lq-text from ftp.cs.toronto.edu, which
is 128.100.1.105 on the Wonderful World Of Internet :-)  The current release
is 1.10, which is the what I posted to alt.sources earlier this month.

I know of people using lq-text on at least the following platforms:
SGI (MIPS)*, Sparc*, Sun 3*, 386/ix(%)%, Sequent*, Ultrix (MIPS).
There's even a Xenix 286 user (!!), although that port took some work...
If your machine falls into one of those, it should either work (marked *) or
be easy (+) or hard (!) to port.  Lq-text was developed on 386/ix and then
under SunOS 4.0.3 when I bought a Sun 4/110...


Almost all the problems are ndbm/dbm/gdbm/hash/sdbm/...-related.  A good
thing to try is
	testbin/dbmtry 5000
	testbin/dbmtry 7000
You should see slowly counting numbers.  Error messages from dbmtry are pretty
loud, so you won't miss them!  If you get errors, things to do are:
* try a different dbm clone (preferably not "dbm" itself, although ndbm works)
* if you are on a System V system, use bcopy.o rather than memcpy, as the
  latter gets overlapped memory moves wrong.

* ozmahash
  I included a version of the BSD hash package, but this turns out to have
  problems.  Symptoms include
  * doesn't work very well on System V
  * the first invocation of lqaddfile is OK, but subseqent ones either
    produce an error message or dump core

  I'm going to try and track the latter problem down.  One possibility is
  if you don't set the ENDIAN definition when compiling the ozmahash lib.
  (the next release of lq-text will rename it "bsdhash").

  In the meantime, sdbm works fine, and you can get it from nexus.yorku.ca
  [130.63.9.1] as /pub/oz/sdbm.shar.Z if you don't have it.  Sdbm is not
  quite so fast as hash, but faster then ndbm.

* gdbm
  I'm told that you get core dumps if you try and use this.  I'm not
  surprised -- I haven't tested it because of a licence conflict...

* running out of memory
  Run lqaddfile with the -w option -- 
	find . -type f -print | lqaddfile -t2 -w60000 -f -
  takes about 3 megabytes of physical memory on my machine, and less on
  many others.  The default uses rather a lot of memory -- over 12 MBytes...

You should be able to compile with any of
    cc
    gcc
    /usr/5bin/cc (on a Sun)
You can also use Saber-C.  Anyone doing serious C work almost certainly has
Saber-C by now, I suspect... so I have included a saber.project file.

There are a few small patches, so as soon as I have sorted out the current
set of problems I'll make a new release and post diffs.

There are some problems that will make some versions of lint barf (although
Saber is silent, and so was SunOS lint) -- I'll try and fix those up.

Suggestions for future work are welcome -- not that I can promise anything!

Lee

-- 
Liam R. E. Quin,  lee at sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337
    `A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended'
						Ursula K. Le Guin, in _Tehanu_