[Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 45, Issue 15

[Bob Supnik]

My goodness! So many suggestions, I hardly know how to deal with them all...

1. Source control

There is already a SimH project on SourceForge.  It is not up to 
date.  There are several admins (other than me), feel free to bother 
them to bring it up to date.

2. Distributed source management

Well, no.  SimH is not a democracy.  The sources are not open for 
changes from a community.  Instead, each major subsection has a lead 
designer/implementer/editor, and his/her decisions are final.  For 
the control package, and many of the simulators, that's me.  The HP, 
Interdata, and DG simulators have their own leads, as does Ethernet 
and some other subsections.

As I've repeatedly stated, I want to see development focused on the 
simulators themselves, and not on the control package.  Too many 
ideas for the core have proven to be non-portable.  SimH runs on 
Windows, Linux, all major flavors of Unix, MacOS, and VMS.  Any 
additions to the core have to run on them as well.  And any changes 
to existing code need to be proven on all of them.

If you want to write a new simulator, or add a peripheral to an 
existing simulator, you can more or less do as you please.  If you 
want to modify someone else's code, you'll have to persuade them that 
it's a good idea.

3. C99, INT64, and other cleanup

SimH is nearly 15 years old.  It started when PC's were 66Mhz 
486's.  The code reflects a concern for performance and conservation 
of resources.  I'd like to keep it that way.  The vast majority of 
PC's in the world are still 32b, and that will continue to be true 
for some time.  And some SimH host systems will always be 32b.

The _c99 flag was put in the make file to cope with a major bug in 
gcc 3.3/3.4.  If you are absolutely sure that no one is using those 
versions of gcc anymore, world wide, then it can come out.

4. Documentation files

PDF format is universally readable.  The alternative would be Word 
(the actual document source format).

/Bob Supnik