Re: DPKG not compiling due to differences between Alpha and Intel...

[David Mosberger-Tang <davidm@AZStarNet.com>]

>>>>> On Mon, 29 Jan 96 03:30 GMT, Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> said:

  Ian> I discover that the syscall I want is documented but isn't
  Ian> implemented consistently in the libcs, and there doesn't seem
  Ian> to be any way for me to use it that'll work on any system.

  Ian> If someone gives me a nice solution for dpkg I'll put it in the
  Ian> code.  Until then I don't see that there's much I can do other
  Ian> than what I'm doing at the moment - namely, use _syscallX and
  Ian> report it as a bug against each successive version of the libc.

You certainly need not work around a missing syscall in Linux/Alpha.
The kernel is still under development so few people will be surprised
if something is missing occasionally.  Though things are getting real
close to being complete, so maybe it's soon time to make a final pass
over the syscall lists to add all missing (and sensible) calls.

I do think that using _syscallX is generally a bad idea.  For the
Alpha, we have a libinux.a that contains syscall stubs for all Linux
specific syscalls (e.g., the module-related calls).  IMHO, it would be
nice to do the same on the other platforms so that _syscall() is
really used in experimental code only.

	--david