Hi Guys,

First of all, let me say that I'm a HUGE fan of MBSE, have been for literally for almost as long as I've been playing with UNIX BBSing (early 90s onwards).

Anyway, I posted a bug report a while ago and was wondering if anyone
actually
took a look at it?

TL;DWR: The bug is at https://sourceforge.net/p/mbsebbs/tickets/9/ (ticket
#9,
damn it, I WANTED A PRIME NUMBER :P) and my more indepth explanatin of the problems I encountered are here:

Not sure if you guys still read this echo but I'm running MBSE 1.0.6 and I
can across a few bug and ssome minor inconveniences in the compilation
process,
mainly:

I. There are some places in the code where a pointer is case to an int.
This DOES NOT work on certain platform, zLinux being one of them with
32-bit ints and 64-bit pointer.

For example, this is potentially dangerous:

filelist.c:496:3: warning: cast from pointer to integer of different size
\
[-Wpointer-to-int-cast (unsigned int)tmpf->flofp, (unsigned int)tmpf->floff);

Luckily there are only TWO of these bugs in the whole codebase, maybe
some
leftover from the everything-is-32-bit era?

II. If certain #ifdefs do not recognise the CPU, naturally the code doesn't know to call it and what the signal names on that platform are. IMHO this
could be solved by either:

- Having an #elseif, throwing a #warning about unsupported CPU and
setting
the signal name array to some sensible default (I used x86, have no issues)

OR

- Passing in a -DCPU_OVERRIDE_ID="FooProc" and -DUSE_SIGNALS="SomeOtherCpu",
and instructing the user todo this.


My suggestions as to fixes?

I. Never cast a pointer to an int or vice versa. This occurrs exactly TWICE
in your code base, filelist.c:496 and ftn2rfc.c:308 so not a huge fix I
think.

II. Dropping necessary(IMHO) #error's if the CPU is "not one of the above"

In a number of places, the code does a #ifdef to determne the CPU type and whilst I'm impressed by the number of platform supported IBM S/390 and/or z/Series aren't represented (not that I'm surprised, I'm probably the only person in the world running MBSE on any kind of zLinux.

Anyway instead of #error'ing out of the whole compile, I changed the bits
which are CPU sensitive to instead throw a #warn "Unknown CPU, assuming IBM S/390" [of course this should probablysay some differnet].

So from lib/strutil.c:399:2: error: #error "Unknown CPU" I do:

File: lib/strutil.c, starting at line 398>

398: #else
399: #warning "Unknown CPU - defaulting to IBM S/390"
400: return (char *)"IBM S/390";
401: #endif
402: }

I did these/similar changes to these files:

lib/signame.c
lib/strutil.c
mbmon/mbmon.c
mbtask/signame.c

(I just used the signal name array for x86, not ideal but I really didn't
have the time to look up the exact Debian/s390x versions - this shouldn't be too strenuous)

Again you could do this with a -DCPU_OVERRIDE_ID="FooProc" type flag if you don't think an #elseif is a good idea.

Conclusion
----------

On the plus side, I've been running MBSE 1.0.6 on Debian/s390x for months at
a time without a problem, so nothing too vital seems to be broken.

I would however suggest that you look into those void*<->int casts because
that could break on other platforms as well..
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