The ports in here are rather old and should probably be upgraded
to newer versions of GNU software.  Some notes are given here
about how difficult that might be.

gcc
   The main problem in gcc is floating point.  In spite of stating that
   no floating point instructions should be generated gcc still
   generates a few (-msoft-float is not enough).  Gcc will execute
   floating point instructions with -O so if a port hangs with -O it
   is usually to do with floating point.

   Later versions of gcc change the 386 definition and hence our
   changes wont simply work with later versions of 1.xx but we
   almost got 1.40 to work.  If you continue using Richard's 
   387 emulator then 1.40 should work with little problem.  But
   we did try to modify 1.40 so it generated no 387 instructions
   but never confirmed that we did it (remember libraries have to be
   recompiled with the new compiler so that no 387s instructions
   exist).

   gcc-2.xx produces significantly better code for 386s and can give
   20% to 50% improvement in speed so a Minix version would be worth while.
   Unfortunately gcc-2.xx generates more 387 instructions so either
   Richard's emulator has to be extended or some other emulator is needed.
   It is probably worth looking at Linux for this.  They have gcc-2.1
   running and have a 387 emulator.

   If you have a 387 things are a lot easier.  You must not apply the
   patch for the kernel which disables the 387 (of course).  This should
   be sufficient but you should also make Minix save/restore the 
   387 registers when a context switch happens (and in longjmp and setjmp).

emacs
   The patches given here are for emacs-18.55 but I have had reports
   that they almost work (minor fixable problems) with 18.58.

bash
   I haven't really tried very hard to port later vesions of bash.  When
   I have looked at it the results almost work but often have minor
   problems.  I don't think the solutions are difficult.

gas
   Shouldn't be any problem

make
   Shouldn't be any problem

gdb
   Gdb-4.xx is quite different from gdb-3.5 it would probably port
   with help from our 3.5 port but would require some work.  The bfd
   stuff in gdb-4.xx should work as the Minix port basically allows
   BSD style .o files.

binutils
   We use an amazingly old version of ld.  I'm surprised that we found it.
   This is by chance rather than design.  However later versions are quite 
   different but they shouldn't be too difficult to work with.  We have tried
   to be as BSD-like as possible.


Although we no longer will be providing upgrades for Minix-386 ports
of GNU stuff I am willing to answer questions about technical aspects.
Although we still have Minix-386 on our machine I think it will be deleted
soon as we now run 386bsd.

Alan

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan W Black                          80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK
Dept of Artificial Intelligence       tel: (+44) -31 650 2713
University of Edinburgh               email: awb@ed.ac.uk