Re: [TUHS] screen editors

On Sat, 11 Jan 2020 at 14:59, markus schnalke <meillo(a)marmaro.de> wrote: GNU ed appears to be written entirely by one person (as in, no changelog entries by anyone else since 1994), who perhaps not coincidentally is also the author of the lzip compression program. As you noted, ed source is distributed only as lzip-compressed tarballs, so you have to be able to compile and run lzip to compile and run ed. lzip is written in C++, so to have access to GNU ed you need a C++ compiler. Which is very strange, as GNU ed is a very simple C program, much as one would expect. The configure program is extremely basic, which is great - why have more than you need? - but when it detected that my $(CC) was not gcc, it hard-coded $(CC) to cc and $(CFLAGS) to -O2, ignoring what I had passed to the script. A strange choice, but one that can easily be edited later in the Makefile. The basic C source compiled with no warnings whatsoever, always a good sign. At the linking stage I noticed that I needed a library for some functions it wanted. Okay, easy enough, just add a library to the Makefile's LDFLAGS. But the Makefile had this braindamage: $(progname) : $(objs) $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $(objs) so on any platform that needs libraries linked after objects, it will fail. At that point, I gave up. This is clearly one person's pet project and has "but it works on my Linux box!" written all over it. That, coupled with the fact that the GNU folks are willing to endorse something that is solely distributed in what can only be described as an extremely obscure compression format, was just too much for me to handle. -Henry