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Minor victory in ex-SCO application

47,300 lines of C (plus 6,800 lines of headers) should not take a full day of effort to get to compile, yet compile it does... & even seems to work.

The few sections I tested on my laptop (running Mandriva Linux 2009.1 rather than SCO Unix 5.0.7) behaved flawlessly. Now if the rest proves to be working, we’re poised to actually change a few things, to the immense relief of their staff.

Driving a terminal (any terminal other than strict VT-100B at 24x80 (or x132) would be good) via ncurses rather than from hand-coded printfs to “\33[%d;%dH” would be fantastic. Then we could axe the proprietary terminal program they’re forced to use under MS-Windows (was even Windows98 in one case until the day before yesterday).

Printing (eventually via PDFs &) CUPS will mean that they can use the hp laser (which does only wordprocessing now) for reports & documents like reminders (A5 sized) & invoices. This replaces a dodgy, ageing impact printer (again, hand-coded with “\33w0” & the like).

Writing CSV files will mean that they can actually use their own data for purposes other than those recognised by the original programmer. Using a modern OS will mean instant backups (via tar, bzip2) to USB flash sticks.

Running on Linux means modern facilities, secure updates, secure/encrypted SSH access from wherever (including from MS-Windows machines via PuTTY).

The horizons are boundless! (-:

Comments

GregoryO said…
I'm getting goosebumps from the excitement. Seriously though, it's great to read about direct and unabashed improvement - must be fulfilling to be the prime mover (:
14 August, 2009 09:33
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Even more fulfilling than the (doubtless temporary) end to frustration after battling countless anarchaisms & an... odd... indenting scheme. (-:
15 August, 2009 12:06
otto said…
i really like your post, very informative
24 August, 2009 17:01
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