On 3/4/25 4:55 PM, Rob Gingell wrote:
> On 3/4/25 7:07 AM, Chet Ramey via TUHS wrote:
>> We expected a lot less from the system and compiler in the bash-1.12 days;
>> that helped here.
>
> How would those expectations differ from what V7 provided, as PAUNIX's
> ambitions only went that far (not that they couldn't be expanded but...)
> The thing is the Harrenstein C must've gotten more complete runtime support
> to run 1.12 and seems like that'd exceed V7 and make PAUNIX even more futile.
This would have been 1991-1992, so we were working on mostly 4.3 BSD (me)
and SunOS (Brian). We didn't expect more than K&R from the compiler, even
though we were primarily using gcc. It was before autoconf, so we rolled
our own version to create a `sysdefs.h', and had code to choose between
POSIX, USG, and BSD versions of functions. I don't think it would have
compiled on anything older than possibly 4.2 BSD, and probably not that,
so I think your speculation about the post-V7 runtime support is on the
mark.
I have bash-2.04 running on 4.1C BSD. I don't remember whether I used gcc-1.42 or gcc-2.81 to build it, but it was one of the two. In my experience 2.04 is the last version that will successfully build and run on many very older systems, though I believe there are a few where I was not able to get past 1.14. At least on 4.1C, I've successfully used 2.04 to run all sorts of configure scripts and I don't remember ever having run into significant issues.
-Henry