Patching TinyMUSH 2.2.3 for Red Hat 5

Getting Started

I've got mushes running on two Linux machines, one Red Hat 4.1, and one Red Hat 4.2. A few weeks ago I upgraded the 4.2 machine to Red Hat 5.0, and later realized that machine's (hardly utilized) mush hadn't been running.

It turns out Red Hat 5.0 made a number of noticeable changes to the system libraries, including:

The crypt() call used for passwords moved from libc.so to libcrypt.so.
The datatype for random() changed from int to int32_t.
The srandom() declaration is, in fact, defined.
The declaration for sys_errlist moved from errno.h to stdio.h.
The declaration for random moved from math.h to stdlib.h
The declaration for getpagesize was a size_t, it's now an int.
The GDBM library still isn't detected correctly.

I decided, finally, to learn how configure scripts work, and after about 15 hours of experimention I now have a patch to the default distribution's configure.in and src/autoconf.in that fix these problems.

Caveats: This works on my machine. I have no idea if it will work on yours!

Two warnings related to const pointers being assigned to vars now occur in udb_misc.c. I've ignored them and they seem to cause no grief.

An apparent bug in an autoconf macro causes an "rm - invalid .." complaint during the execution of ./configure. This is a cosmetic problem that appears to have no effect on the results. (If it annoys you, apply the optional patch where indicated to insert a missing newline between an 'rm' and the following 'echo'.)

Since Red Hat 5 breaks existing binaries, you'll have to db_unload your database before upgrading from Red Hat 4.x to 5.0. If you didn't, you'll have to find a 4.x system to unload your database on. Luckily my home machine is still 4.1, and my 4.2 binary still worked on it!

I am not a unix developer, at least not for C applications. I can't make any statements about the correctness of this patch except that it compiles, links, and appears to run on my little office mush. I've offered this patch in the hope someone more knowledgeable can use it as a starting point for incorporating "official" corrections for these problems into the distribution someday.

Actually Building TinyMUSH

Here's the sequence of commands I used to rebuild TinyMUSH 2.2.3 on a Linux Red Hat 5.0 system with a uname -a of:

Linux tardis.arh.ms.cdc.com 2.0.32 #1 Tue Mar 3 13:19:09 /etc/localtime 1998 i586 unknown

tar -xzf /usr/local/src/tinymush-2.2.3.tar.gz
cd tinymush-2.2.3/
patch <../RedHat5.patch
autoconf
optional: patch <../optional.patch
./configure --src=./src
vi Makefile
vi src/config.h
make
make install
cd ../game
./Startmush

You can read the log of the build session.

The patch files are available at: my FTP area.

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This page last updated Sunday, 17-May-1998 22:20:54 CDT.