ecu3 help is on the way (was Re: Help - Compiling ecu3)

Sat Feb 9 06:27:10 AEST 1991

In article <5850 at uafhp.uark.edu> bbs00361 at uafcseg.uucp (Jose Gomez) writes:
>To compile ecu3, remove all malloc references in the makefile and in
>ecu.h.  Undefine the #define MALLOC_3X to #undef MALLOC_3X in ecu.h and
>remove the -lmalloc from the $(LDFLAGS) declaration.
>I have it running and works fine.

Patch 5 is coming out soon.

.---------------.
| ECU 3 PATCH 5 |
`---------------'

1. Fixed memory leak + bad free in feval_str().

2. Some common types of procedure string operations have been made faster
by redesign of the realloc_esd() function.

3. Octal integer constants were implemented; they may be denoted by
prefixing them with "0o".  Leading zero octal constants are not supported
due to ECUs mutiple use of the same integer constant parser.  I thought 
most people would rather %itos("0200") return 200(10) than 128(10).

4. Many line drivers, particularly FAS, will wait a process closing
a tty line until all characters queued for output have been sent.
When closing a tty line that has been permanently XOFF'ed by a 
dead remote system or a noisy XOFF, this can result in a hang.
Now, a SIGALRM/setjmp scheme is used to recover from this condition
and flush line output before reattempting the close.  Five
seconds are allowed for the draining to occur.

5. Multiscreen normal and reverse foreground and background colors
in effect at the beginning of ecu execution are restored when the
program terminates (thanks to staceyc at sco for illuminating the
undocumented GIO_IOCTL ioctl; I've wanted to be able to do this for
a long time).

6. lamy at glsys.in-berlin.de reported a core dump immediately after
the one-line startup message under XENIX 286.  Others have had the
problem too.  I am puzzled -- it is happening in get_home_dir(),
which seems rather straightforward.  A patch to avoid the problem
is included: get the home directory from the environment variable
HOME if possible rather than invoke libpwent.a.

7. An embarassing nroff problem was reported by slerner at eingedi.
Patches are included for the nroff source.  Mr. Lerner also pointed
out an obsolete reference to samplproc.man.  The models subdirectory
contain many sample, even useful, procedures and samplproc.man
was discarded a long time ago.

If you do not have nroff or the spare CPU cycles to make the
manual from nroff source, I'll email you one. Just mail me
at wht at n4hgf.Mt-Park.GA.US or emory!n4hgf!wht and put
"send ecu305 manual" in the subject line.  If I get enough
requests, I'll repost it to c.s.m as ecuman305.

8. A make bug in the trial ISC port was fixed in Make.ecu (thanks to
jmd at p1so).

9. During non-curses file transfer, the cumulative elapsed time
is reported once per complete line of 'RRRTRR..' status.

10. ache at hq.demos.su reported a bug in XENIX utmp handler
code.  This is a fix for most XENIX systems, but define OLD_WAY
in utmpstat.c if you have problems.

11. Sometimes upon adding a new phone entry, it would be marked
for redial upon creation.  This has been fixed by using calloc()
instead malloc().

12. We seem to be bumping some limits on 286 systems.  I added
more code to handle more core dumps reported by lamy at glsys.in-berlin.de:
somehow newwin() managed to return zero (probably memory alloc fail).
The patch to ecuwinutil.c won't fix the problem, but will at least
report it and die gracefully, rather than splatter on the pavement
with a core dump.  Please write me with bug reports and crash info:
see below.

.--------------------.
| NOTES and REQUESTS |
`--------------------'

1. I do not have any XENIX system to test with.  It is a tribute
to SCO orthogonality that 35,000+ line program works so well
across 2 CPUs and two operating systems of many minor releases
and many versions of development systems.  I continue to point
this out when I hear SCO-bashers do their thing.  However, since
s**t does happen, if you are reporting a problem that results in
a core dump, please run the following for me (I would APPRECIATE it):

  % cd where ecu is
  % ./ecu
  ----- kaboom -----
  % ^Jstty sane^J if needed (probably)
  % adb ./ecu |& tee to.wht
  * $x
  * $c
  * $r
  * $q
If you are a really industrious one and have sdb and compiled with -g,
  % sdb ./ecu |& tee -a to.wht
  % t
  % q
Then  
  % mail -s 'ecu 3.xx core dump' wht at n4hgf.mt-park.ga.us < to.wht

2. ache at hq.demos.su has made some excellent suggestions which
would enhance the line handling/choosing algorithms.  They will
require a change in the phone directory.  He suggests I interpret
old directory formats, while writing only new ones.  The changes
are far reaching and I haven't the time now to plug them in,
but kudos to him and I'll try to find A Round Tuit.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Warren Tucker, TuckerWare   gatech!n4hgf!wht or wht at n4hgf.Mt-Park.GA.US
Many [Nobel physics] prizes  have been given  to people for  telling us
the universe is not as simple as we thought it was. -Stephen Hawking in
A Brief History of Time     In computing, there are no such prizes. -me
Newsgroups: gomez at enuxha.eas.asu.edu
Subject: Re: Help - Compiling ecu3
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References: <4396 at ubbs-nh.MV.COM> <1991Jan13.040319.7912 at nshore.uucp> <5850 at uafhp.uark.edu>
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In article <5850 at uafhp.uark.edu> bbs00361 at uafcseg.uucp (Jose Gomez) writes:
>To compile ecu3, remove all malloc references in the makefile and in
>ecu.h.  Undefine the #define MALLOC_3X to #undef MALLOC_3X in ecu.h and
>remove the -lmalloc from the $(LDFLAGS) declaration.
>I have it running and works fine.

Patch 5 is coming out soon.

.---------------.
| ECU 3 PATCH 5 |
`---------------'