[Freeciv-Dev] Port of freeciv to OpenVMS...

[Roger Tucker <roger.tucker@xxxxxxxx>]

I've finished a port of the CVS development version of FreeCIV
both the GTK client and the server to OpenVMS and tested them.
This also included a port of IMLIB 1.9.8.  (The other libraries
GLIB, GTK+, and GDK were already ported and are used for Mozilla.)
I'm in the process of fully testing IMLIB and will get my build
scripts into the standard IMLIB distribution if I can.

FreeCIV's code is very clean and there were NO CODE CHANGES except
for a few lines in sernet.c in routine sniff_packets() and of course
build scripts for VMS.  Great job!  All the other code (so far) works
great.  (VMS is posix compliant so even the unix file-name conventions
work fine.)  The main problem is that there is no config/autoconfig
for VMS although Bash, tar, cc, make, is available or you can use
the standard DEC-C compiler (the same one for Unix, or Linux)
available with VMS.

The code changes in sernet.c were because select() on OpenVMS
currently only works with sockets and not with other file descriptors
and the code to check feof() doesn't seem to make since.  Some
Unix versions must return eof if there is no characters in the
type-a-head buffer.  This lack of Unix compatibility in select()
is being fixed the next version of VMS, but for now we need a
few small changes to sernet.c.

I was hoping to release binaries for AlphaVMS as well as the build
script with the next stable release of freeciv.  I can also test
the client/server on alpha Linux to make that works as well.
I don't have much time, but I was also hoping to help out with
any bugs or enhancements where I can.

I just wanted to tell you what I've done so you can add me to
the "Projects and Ports" web page and eventually I want to add
one file (a VMS build script) to the standard FreeCiv source
distribution and a patched version of sernet.c.  Other than that,
it's mostly just testing it and having fun playing with with it.

If you have any questions or comments just let me know.

Roger