Re: [MiNT] MiNTOS sources

[Stephen Usher <Stephen.Usher@earth.ox.ac.uk>]

>OK... as I'm improving NMD further, I'm reviewing the structure of 
>packages and ran into several pitfalls when recompiling MiNTOS:
>
>1) INIT - Looks for implicit paths declarations pre-compiled within
>   mintlib, instead of defining its own filenames or using paths.h
>   which makes it a pain in the ass to maintain and modify.
>
>   Has anybody compiled a more recent version of INIT which uses
>   the centralized paths.h include?

I take it you mean wtmp and utmp when you talk about certain paths. Well,
before init these weren't anywhere. I merely created an internal library for
MiNTOS which held utility functions and fucntions not yet available within the
MiNTlibs at the time.

After I released the first version, the MiNTlibs maintainer asked if he could
add the wtmp and utmp reading and writing utility functions into the libraries
and I agreed

>2) Contradictions - Other binaries, oddly enough, explicitely override
>   paths.h in compiler options or by duplicating 90% of paths.h in a
>   localized pathnames.h file.
>
>   Has anybody cleaned that up, when recompiling their MiNTOS kit?

When init was written none of this was in MiNTlibs.

>3) Distribution - The idea of nested Makefiles sounds cool, but in
>   practice one has to edit individual Makefiles to change global
>   compiling option (such as:  -m68000 -O3  which should be global).
>
>   Has anybody improved those nested Makefiles, so that only stuff
>   pertaining to specific binaries remain in individual Makefile?

You could always use a GNU make extension to include a Makefile options file.
I just used generic make Makefiles so as to be able to test them on a Sun
system.

>4) Getty - I recall someone mentioning some KGMD hacks that broke 
>   certain things, a while back, but cannot remember what it was.
>
>   Can anybody indicate which parts of MiNTOS were hacked for KGMD
>   and detail what problems might have been reported in this aspect?

I think they broke it by hard-coding tty modes rather than getting them from
gettytab.

>Steve:
>
>If you're reading this, it would be nice if you could point me to
>specific sources for all of the packages, so I can find out if any
>parts have more recent versions with improved functionalities, and
>if you could also tell me where to remove that motd-override thing
>(it automatically pastes "MiNTOS 1.4.1 (KGMD 1.0) #1 (date here)" 
>onto /etc/motd all the time).

I just lifted the sources straight from the BSD 4.4 source tree, except for
init which I had to write from scratch. I made the smallest number of changes
to get them to compile under the then current MiNTlibs.

Take a look in one of the /etc/rc files for the motd stuff, I borrowed this
bit from Linux, or was it SunOS 4.1.x.. I can't remember now.

Steve

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