I found the problem which caused "mcopy a:*.c ." to files with
unreadable filenames. The problem was that it was trying to convert the
uppercase MS-DOS filenames to lowercase, and this was failing because
tolower() is incorrectly defined in ctype.h: the plus sign should be a
minus sign.
diff -r1.1 ctype.h
31c31
< #define tolower(c) (_ctmp=c,isupper(_ctmp)?_ctmp+('a'+'A'):_ctmp)
If you are trying to port programs to Linux, you should apply this patch
to your ctype.h --- it could save you a lot of aggravation. (I know
that it will cause problems with flex at the very least, and probably
many other programs.)
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I agree with Peter McDonald's observation that it is extremely nice to
have only compiler for Linux, and it would be a shame if one needed to
have both compilers around, depending on which compiler was used by a
developer. At the very least, it would make the code uglier as people
put in porting #ifdef's. gcc has a lot to recommend it, especially
since version 2.0 gives you g++ and Objective C basically for free.
I note that once Linux has paging, gcc will be able to work with 2 meg
machines, although granted, it will be slower than normal. I don't know
what kind of speed hit gcc on a 2 meg machine with paging would take,
but perhaps this would be sufficient that we can just have one main
compiler for Linux.
Also, memory is getting relatively cheap these days --- we're talking
maybe US$30 to US$40 per megabyte if your machine can take SIMMS.
Upgrading a machine from 2 meg to 4 meg doesn't cost *that* much money.
As long as the system will run gcc (albeit slowly), would this alleviate
concerns about insufficient support of 2 meg machines?
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Along the lines of having only one compiler for Linux, I am currently
looking into how it might be possible to assmeble the 16-bit binary
portions of Linux, so that we could just use gas to compile the boot
sector and setup code. There ar...
