Deleting owned files...

[Michael Smith <miff@apanix.apana.org.au>]

Greetings :

I'm currently being bitten by the "can't delete lockfile" bug, and it's 
being a bit of a pain - programs that create lockfiles but can't 
delete them.

I suspect this is also the reason why tar 1.11.2 (I rebuilt this with the
pl44 mintlibs if anyone is interested) can't set ownership/permissions
on files it extracts sometimes (that's annoying!).


For what it's worth, I have the following on the way :

Taylor 1.05 (compiles, programs run, about to test callout when I
finish this mail)

uWalt News (built fine, seems to run, can't test due to lockfile 
problems discussed above)

Elm 2.4 (unbuilt, problems extracting symbols from library, suspect 
sed (built 2.03, doesn't appear to work properly - may need more stack)

Smail (current version from uunet - initial config done - still looking
for a more compact mail transport agent)


A couple of things :

An IMMENSE thankyou to everyone who's worked on MiNT - getting this
much done has been hard, but very impressive.  There are any number of
hardcore unixans, amigans and so forth who are also very impressed 8)

Nobody was more impressed than _me_ though 8)


To anyone attempting to run an FSF configure script :

If it hangs at the eleventh hour (literally, the taylor script 
takes about an hour running with Bash in fastram on a 4/4 TT)
while creating config.status, the offending line looks like this :

# on host `(hostname || uname -n) 2>/dev/null |sed 1q `:

The symptoms of this hang are a zombie sh/bash (0 size file in /proc).
I'm not sure what's happening, whether we have an out-of-memory
condition or what, but removing this line fixes it, and it sure beats
hand-configuring.

If you want to play with Taylor before I'm done, there is very little to
do after configure has run :

in the lib, uuconf and unix directories, replace   "ar rc"  with "ar rs"
(I don't have any manual pages for ar, but with the former arguments,
ld won't find anything in the libraries.

edit config.h and in the section for statfs, set STAT_STATFS4 to 0
and STAT_STATFS2_BSIZE to 1 - configure gets that one wrong.

in the unix/ directory, edit the file isfork.c and include in it the
fragment of serial.c that defines EAGAIN (I take it MiNT never 
returns EAGAIN?) or do it by hand if you're not interested in 
portability 8)

That's really about it.  If there's any interest and I get this all
working I'll probably do an integrated package with the lot bundled
together. 

-- 
# mike smith : miff@apanix.apana.org.au - Silicon grease monkey        #
# "The question 'why are the fundamental laws of nature mathematical'  #
# then invites the trivial response 'because we define as fundamental  #
# those laws which are mathematical'". Paul Davies, _The_Mind_of_God_. #