Mac OS9 support

Mac OS9 support

[Sébastien Kirche]

Hi,

Since recent changes  from Yamamoto Mitsuharu for OS9 support,  i am now able
to build Emacs for that platform.

Following an  advice from  Stefan Monnier to  get rid  of the 512  MB memory
limit I also  defined USE_LSB_TAG and it seems that  it works correctly with
OS9.

However, if some common tasks work  (calendar, dired, ...) i tried to launch
Gnus and it failed with the following:

Loading gnus...done
Loading gnus-start...
Loading executable...done
Loading easymenu...done
Loading gnus-start...done
Loading gnus-agent...
shell-command-to-string: Searching for program: bad file number, sh

I remember that with the 20.6 version for OS9 (that was maintained by Andrew
Choi ?)  there was a Binaries folder  with sh and hexl  dummy binaries. They
did nothing but Emacs used to look for the presence of these binaries.

I tried  to recompile the old versions  and put them along  the Emacs binary
but i failed then on another problem :

shell-command-to-string: Doing vfork: bad file number

This error does not really talk to me...

Are  the old dummy  binaries still  necessary for  proper execution  of some
tasks  ? What  is  still missing  ?  Or is  there some  tasks  that are  not
available to the OS9 platform ?

Thanks for some info.

-- 
Sébastien Kirche

Re: Mac OS9 support

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu]

>>>>> On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 17:15:22 +0100, Sébastien Kirche <sebastien.kirche.no@spam.free.fr.invalid> said:

> However, if some common tasks work (calendar, dired, ...) i tried to
> launch Gnus and it failed with the following:

The Mac OS 9 version does not support asynchronous processes or
network connections.  The synchronous process support is limited and
can only invoke specially-crafted programs.  The "Emacs and the Mac
OS" node in the Emacs info says:

  The following features of Emacs are not yet supported on the Mac OS
  8 or 9: unexec (`dump-emacs'), asynchronous subprocesses
  (`start-process'), and networking (`open-network-stream').  As a
  result, packages such as Gnus, GUD, and Comint do not work.
  However, synchronous subprocesses (`call-process') are supported.
  Since external programs to handle commands such as `print-buffer'
  and `diff' are not available on Mac OS 8 or 9, they are not
  supported.

> shell-command-to-string: Doing vfork: bad file number

> This error does not really talk to me...

Maybe some appropriate error message should be shown when a user tries
to use unsupported features.  I'll look into this matter.

				     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
				mituharu@math.s.chiba-u.ac.jp