Feb2001 hugs98 on MacOS

[Hans Aberg]

At 15:47 -0700 2001/02/28, Alastair Reid wrote:
>Some advice to people submitting changes:
>
>Back in the days when I was maintaining Hugs, changes were substantially more
>likely to be merged into the main base if they were decomposed into a
>number of
>small, independent changes whose impact and consequences could be
>understood in
>isolation from the other changes.
>
>For example, Hans' stack overflow changes sound like a feature that all Hugs
>users could benefit from (i.e., not just MacOS users) but it really needs
>to be
>submitted as a separate set of patches if Johan is to correctly integrate them
>and if various individuals around the world are to submit modifications which
>make the stack overflow code work on other platforms (Sparcs, x86s, etc.)

I think so too, that some such stuff should be of general applicability.
The things that do not fall into this category, and is platform specific,
should be moved, and be put into a separate set of sources. (As I have done
with some of the Mac stuff that formerly was in the Hugs kernel sources.)

The reason this does not happen entirely so, is that the Hugs kernel code
is very monolithic, with nearly all names not exported, .c files exotically
included in .c files, instead of putting the relevant names in a header.

So it is hard to do something as intrusive as making an MacOS
implementation of it without putting in the right hooks.

As for the code itself, the only reasonable is to put it in as it is, and
move then move the portions when one knows where they should be. -- It is
too big, to do anything else. (One will end up on the equation that Johan
is experimenting with, trying to reimplement rather a lot of work.)

-- As for myself, I do not really have time even to patch up new version
every time the is a new release of the Hugs kernel.

So if you want to make your own, entirely new reimplementation, I can only
wish you good luck! :-)

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
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