Miranda™ System

This directory contains everything you should need to create a working version of the Miranda system.

Instructions

Before compiling Miranda on a new host, execute the following commands:

make cleanup

This removes old object files and collects information about the current platform in .host.

Then, execute:

make

This should recreate a working version of Miranda, in this directory. To try it out, execute ./mira.

Before doing the make, you might want to inspect the first few lines of Makefile which sets the options to cc and a few other things that might need adjusting.

There is a selection of example Miranda scripts in the directory ex. For stress testing the garbage collector, try ./mira ex/parafs.m (say output).

Note that in a mira session, /e opens the editor (default vi) on the current script.

Other makefile targets supported are (need to be executed as root):

• make install: copies the mira executables and associated files (miralib, mira.1) to the appropriate places in the root filing system, so they can be accessed by all users.
• make release: creates a gzipped tar image of the binaries suitable for installing Miranda on other machines of the same object code type.

To use the tar image on another machine, be root, and say:

cd /
tar xzpf [pathname]

where [pathname] is the gzipped tarfile.

Before make install or make release, you should inspect paths BIN, LIB, MAN at the top of the Makefile and modify if needed, to put things at the places in the root filing system where you want them to go.

Troubleshooting

Be aware that the garbage collector works by scanning the C stack to find anything that is or seems to be a pointer into the heap (see bases() in data.c) and is therefore somewhat fragile as it can be foxed by aggressive compiler optimisations. GC errors manifest as "impossible event" messages, or segmentation faults. If these appear, try recompiling at a lower level of optimisation (e.g. without -O) or with a different C compiler - e.g. clang instead of gcc or vice versa.

What to do if things need changing

It is possible that everything will work first time, just on saying make. If however you are obliged to make changes for the new host (the XYZ machine say), it best to proceed as follows.

The second line of the Makefile defines some CFLAGS (used by cc). As delivered, most of these are commented out, leaving -O as the only flag. Add a flag -DXYZ to the CFLAGS line. Then at each place in a source file where you have to change something, do it in the following style:

#ifdef XYZ
    your modified code
#else
    the original code
#endif

You will see that this method has been used to cater for certain machine dependencies at a few places in the sources. Looking to see where this has already been done is likely to give you an idea as to which lines may need modifying for your machine.

If you are running under System 5 UNIX, you may include -DSYSTEM5 in the CFLAGS line of the Makefile, as a couple of system 5 dependencies are #ifdef'd in the sources (relate to signal(), unclear if they are still needed).

One other place where platform dependency is possible is in twidth() near bottom of file steer.c, which uses an ioctl() call to find width of current window. This feature isn't critical, however, just aesthetic.

The sources have no documentation other than embedded comments: you have to figure out how things work from these and the Makefile.

Reports of problems encountered, changes needed, etc to mira-bugs (at) miranda.org.uk. Thanks!

David Turner University of Kent 13.01.2020