Re: Porting to IBM RS/6000

[slevy]

Sounds good, thanks for undertaking this!

It's unfortunate that you picked up geomview 1.4.1; most of the problems
you encountered were fixed in 1.4.2, which has been out since April.
You can find this up for anonymous FTP from geom.umn.edu under
pub/software/geomview.  Also there should be a 1.4.3 source release there
in the next day or so.

The O.* setup was built to allow compiling for multiple machines in the
same source tree.  Since you presumably don't need to do that, setting
mk.rs6000's MACHTYPE to sgi seems like a fine thing to do.

Are you sure alloca() isn't supported under AIX?  I believe it's simply
re-named __alloca.  We've used it in the X version of geomview,
by using -Dalloca=__alloca in the options passed globally to the C
compiler when compiling under AIX (SYSCOPTS in mk.rs6000).  One user has
advised us that the compiler (or linker?) should also be given the -ma flag to
make alloca() safely callable, maybe by increasing the available stack space.

#define alloca malloc is a bad idea, since alloca() is fairly freely used,
and the allocated memory will never be freed if alloca becomes malloc.

   Stuart Levy