GRASS 4.0 / NeXt

[Allan B Branscomb]

As some of you may know, we have ported GRASS 4.0 to the NeXt and have been
testing it there.  Although other components we have tested work fine, the
windowing subsystem encounters both a missing feature and a system kernal bug.

GRASS 4.0 implements interprocess communication with W-Windows via 'named
pipes'.  In most UNIX's these pipes are created at the shell level by use of
the mknod command with a 'p' parameter.  Although this parm is not available
in NeXt's mknod command its equivalent is available programmatically via
mknod(2), with a certain parm (S-IFIO) or'd into the creation mode mask.
 
When Next implemented this however, they neglected to initialize the data
structures to zero thus leaving junk in critical places, and no-workee.

The company may fix this in an update to their OS sometime in the Spring.  In
the meantime, other options appear to include going outside current GRASS 
code a little either by use of message sending and receiving (msg_send(),
msg_receive()), or by using NeXt graphical objects instead of X-windows.

Does anyone, at CERL or elsewhere, have a better idea, or a working
solution?

thanks,

allan branscomb (allanb at oregon.uoregon.edu)