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Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 15:10:14 -0800
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To: kaveman@magna.com.au
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In-reply-to: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960328201733.942A-100000@kavemachine.magna.com.au> (message from Julian Jenkins on Thu, 28 Mar 1996 20:34:23 +1000 (EST))
Subject: Re: Questions on porting process
From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami)
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 * I have managed to get spice3f4 working on my system and thought I would 
 * make a port of it. I have a few questions however.

Cool!

 * Spice attempts to perform some sort of check to find out the size of its
 * data segment. When it does this it it dies with a segmentation violation. I
 * can disable this by setting an environment variable
 * (SPICE_NO_DATASEG_CHECK). Would it be better to modify the code so that this
 * is not done anyway or ensure that the environment variable is set?

I think it's better to modify the code.

 * If the code is eliminated should I make a minimum change equivelent to 
 * SPICE_NO_DATASEG_CHECK being found or try to eliminate all the code that 
 * is only used here as possible (using #ifdefs of course)?

A minimum change is fine.  That way it's much easier to see what has
been done later by looking at the patch.

 * The documentation for creating a port says that any conditonal compilation
 * should be done with #ifdefs appropriate for the most general case (ie. not
 * just using _FREEBSD_). How do I find out what the most general case is?

I don't think we know what range of systems it breaks, so #ifdef
__FreeBSD__ is fine.

Satoshi