POSIX and Octave (fwd)

[A. S. Hodel]

This note is being sent to two  mailing lists, so I need to add detail for
each:

I am attempting to port Octave v. 1.1.1 (a Matlab-like program) to the
MachTen (Macintosh based Unix) environment.  The steps completed thus far are

        * modify the configure scripts to recognize the MachTen/mac
          architecture
        * recognize the MachTen as POSIX compliant.

The last step is one I am unsure of; I assumed that this was safe
since the sample environment in the MachTen manual and on-line docs
define POSIX=true.  However, this results in a compile time error that
type u_char, defined in /usr/include/sys/types.h, is not properly
defined, since <sys/types.h> lookes like
...
#ifndef _POSIX_SOURCE
typedef unsigned char   u_char;
typedef unsigned short  u_short;
...
#endif

In other words, the header file doesn't want me to define POSIX compliant
source.  On the other hand, if I don't declare POSIX compliance, then the
gnu readline code doesn't work because (apparently) DIR doesn't get declared
properly in /usr/include/dirent.h

I'm just informed enough to suspect that there's an obvious solution to
this problem, but not enough so to spot what it is.  Any suggestions
would be most appreciated.

A S Hodel Dept Elect Eng 200 Broun Hall, Auburn Univ., AL 36849
(334) 844-1854/fax-1809  http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~scotte