KSH portability

[William Sommerfeld]

In article <4063 at mtgzz.UUCP> avr at mtgzz.UUCP (XMRP50000[jcm]-a.v.reed) writes:
>In article <631 at vsi.UUCP>, friedl at vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
>> 
>> Note that porting ksh is not at all a task for the novice; it is
>> not (to put it politely) "maximally portable".
>
>What experience is that comment based on? 

I don't know about his experience, but I heard an interesting story
from someone at Apollo.

When they did their UNIX emulation for AEGIS, one of the things they
wrote was a version of the stdio library.  They worked from the
published interface specifications for the library (the manual pages),
not from existing source code.  As a result, their definition for what
a FILE * looked like internally was not exactly what is found in the
SysV distribution in <stdio.h>.

They put this into a release, and shipped it.

Some time later, they got an irate phone call fron Korn, who
complained that his shell didn't compile on apollos.  Why?  Portions
of ksh went "around" the published interface to stdio, and mucked with
the elements of the FILE * directly.

Apollo reluctantly re-implemented stdio with a "compatible" header
file.

Korn should have known better.

					- Bill