Re: ANDF [Architecture Neutral Distribution Format] and TDF - What is the current status?

Thank you all for your replies. I have also received some e-mails, so I
think I'd share what I found out:


- TenDRA is dead, the official web site is down, TenDRA 4.1.2 is the
last official version and it can only be found on third party web
sites like www.andf.org, etc.


- The TDF 4.0 standard differs from the ANDF standard only in the way
debug information is treated. As long as no debug information is
written, TDF 4.0 should be upward compatible with ANDF.


- The PostScript file dated June 1995, and the HTML files dated 1998
should be identical except for small editorial changes.


- ANDF is actively worked with, for example at DDC-I.


Getting TenDRA 4.1.2 compiled on SuSE is more complicated than
expected. At home on my older SuSE machine I fixed the dev_t problem
by changing the line "+TYPE ( arith ) dev_t" to "+TYPE dev_t". The
next problem I could fix was the different macro definitions for
POSIX_PATH_MAX. Here the Linux library used 256 whereas TenDRA used
255. The next problem was a header definition in /usr/include/gconv.h
which defined an array of size zero in a struct - apparently a header
of a variable size data structure. It seems that TenDRA doesn't like
array declarations of size 0. In order to make some progress I
commented this one line out, well knowing that this is not the right
fix. Now I'm stuck with different types and function signatures in the
semaphore area.


It seems that the GLIBC that SuSE uses is not that compatible with the
library that Linux used back in 1995. If I can trust my memory, there
was a switch a few years ago when the Linux community replaced the old
system library by the then new GLIBC.


I have the impression that there is no quick way for me to fix the
problems and that I have to learn more about the build process, the
tools used, and the file formats for the tools, especially
tspec. Fortuately all of them build without any problems.


Carsten Kuckuk

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