Menu{Master,Maestro,etc} question(s)

[Jay R. Ashworth]

Twofold: First, how many people still have one of the three versions of
MenuWhatever deployed on production client sites -- specifically, how
many sites?  The topic is, of course, that those binaries won't run on
Linux without Linux-ABI, which doesn't seem to have been ported
reliably to anything newer than 2.6.(9<x<11).  Almost all 2.6 based
distros are past that, and given SCO's recent delisting warning again,
I suspect that porting off of it will become a more promising looking
approach -- *if* you don't have to port your menus back to filePro
menus to do it.

(Off-list replies are fine if you don't want to divulge; I'm just trying
to decide whether the effort of reimplementing it is worthwhile. (And
yes, I know, we've had the "is it worth investing time in commercial
products for the filePro audience" conversation before, as well as how it
came out; let's skip the meta :-).))



Secondly, I'm doing a snap-port of our modified fourGen payroll to
SuSE 10.2, where those old menus won't run, and my approach -- since
only one employee would be in payroll at a time, was to emulate
':replace:', as follows:

========
# mmreplace - use perl to fake a MenuMaster :replace: command
#
# written Tue May  8 16:23:19 EDT 2007 by jra at microsys.us

[ $# = 3 ] ||
        {
        echo "usage: $0 filename line-label replacement
        exit 1
        }

# the regex ahead is:
#
# label:if:var="contents"  :
# ''''','','''','''''''','',
# \1    \2 \3   \4       \5

perl -pi.bak -e "
        if (/^$2:/)
          s/([^:]):([^:]):([^\"])\"([^\"])\"([^:]):/\1:\2:\3\"$3\"\5:/;" $1
========


If that's *correct* (I'm not a perlmonk), anyone who finds themselves in a
similar situation is welcome to it.  If it's *broken*, corrections would
be appreciated.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274