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Date:      Tue, 28 Nov 1995 12:43:17 +0100 (MET)
From:      grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
To:        lyndon@orthanc.com (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers)
Subject:   Enough already! (Was: Where is the documentation for ibcs2?)
Message-ID:  <199511281143.MAA25890@allegro.lemis.de>
In-Reply-To: <199511280011.QAA23175@multivac.orthanc.com> from "Lyndon Nerenberg" at Nov 27, 95 04:11:49 pm

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Lyndon Nerenberg writes:
> 
> Well, going by your argument the man page for cc(1) should also document
> the programming language and libraries, n'est ce pas? Should we also
> incorporate a copy of Stevens in tcp(4)?
> 
> The man page should document the fact the iBCS2 support exists,
> give three short examples of how to enable the support (compile into
> kernel, invoke from sysconfig, load from command line), refer the
> reader to the non-existent handbook section describing all the ugly
> details of the implementation, and include a warning that the code
> is preliminary and shouldn't be used unless you're willing to do some
> digging into the source code.
> 
> Call the manpage ibcs2(8) and create a link called sco(4) (or maybe sco(5)?).
> This makes the two obvious targets for apropos work, and let's people
> discover fairly easily that SCO support does exist, while making no
> bones about the fact that its use is not for the timid.

Boy, that really turned into an all-out battle.  Can we stop now,
guys, and get back to some real work?

I'm replying to Lyndon's message because I think he put it the best.
In the meantime, I think we can all agree on these points:

1. ibcs2 support does require some documentation.  I think Lyndon
   states it best above.

2. ibcs2 is currently not complete.  We should understand that the
   documentation is one part which has hardly even been started.

3. the program /usr/bin/ibcs2 really belongs in /usr/sbin, as Terry
   says.  I don't agree that that absolves it from needing
   documentation.

Beyond that, I think we need to accept the fact that nobody has really
explained how it works.  As Terry suspects, my vi that crapped out the
other day was trying to find a shared library.  It's not clear from
his mail whether it would have worked if it had found one.  In any
case, debugging it with gdb doesn't work: it doesn't get as far as
being executed.

On the other hand, If anybody's interested, I have an almost complete
set of GNU SVR3 binaries, including GNU libc, which I developed on an
SCO system and which work there.  I've tried out a statically linked
bash, and it works, sort of.  It does some strange things from time to
time, such as deciding to receive an exit command, but it doesn't do
that if I ktrace it.

Greg




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