Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2001/04/26/12:27:45
> Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 23:47:12 +0100
> From: Richard Dawe <rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk>
>
> I'd like to announce beta 2 of the port of Fileutils 4.0 to DJGPP.
Thanks for working on this. I finally found some time to download and
look at this port.
Some comments:
1. The binary package:
- I think install.exe should be a symlink and ginstall.exe the
real thing, not the other way around. `install.exe' is too
ubiquitous a name on DOS/Windows to use it safely; also, many
ported packages already force the configure script to run
ginstall.
- There's no need to put both unformatted and formatted man pages
in the binary distro; just the formatted are enough. Although
unformatted pages don't hurt, they do bloat the zip size.
- Files whose names where UPCASED, such as TODO, NEWS, README,
etc. should be stored upcased in the zip, for the sake of users
who set FNCASE=y and want to see the file names as they would on
Unix. (If you have difficulty to make this happen, I can
suggest how to do that.)
- The port of v3.16 had two programs, d.exe and v.exe, which are
missing from this port. Are they no longer installed by the
official distribution?
- The problem with "ginstall -s" being unable to work with
PMODE/DJ-stubbed executables sounds disturbing. Does ginstall
work with CWSDSTUB? What about programs compressed with UPX?
If these don't work either, I think we need to fix `strip' to be
able to work with such programs.
- The messages printed by chown and chgrp are different from those
printed by v3.16: the previous port pretended that the
owner/group _did_ change, while this port's message says the
owner/group were retained, but cites the new owner/group. This
is misleading, IMHO. What is the reason for this change?
2. The source distribution:
- There are no Makefile's and no config.h, which requires
everybody to run the configure script, and have the associated
tools installed. Is there any reason why the source
distribution couldn't come already configured, so that users
could simply say "make"?
- config.bat prints annoying error messages:
aclocal: aclocal: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
autoheader: autoheader: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
automake: automake: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
automake: automake: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
autoconf: autoconf: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
I don't understand why does config.bat try to invoke those
tools, but if it has to, is it possible to redirect these
messages to /dev/null? Alternatively, if these messages _do_
indicate real trouble (see below), I think config.bat should
refuse to continue.
- (Possibly related to the above) It failed to build for me on
Windows 98. I saw several error messages from the configure
script:
checking whether NLS is requested... no
d:/usr/djgpp/bin/sed.exe: can't read ./intl/po2tbl.sed.in: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
[...]
creating po/Makefile.in
d:/usr/djgpp/bin/sed.exe: can't read ./po/Makefile.in.in: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
[...]
creating config.h
d:/usr/djgpp/bin/cat.exe: ./config.h.in: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
and then the fatal error message from Make:
make.exe: *** No rule to make target `m4/jm-winsz1.m4', needed by `aclocal.m4'. Stop.
(Yes, I did see that readme.dos says I should have Autoconf and
Automake installed, but I didn't believe my eyes. ;-) Why would
a user be requested to install those, when Unix users don't need
them? Are there any problems which cannot be solved in a way
that doesn't require these tools? If so, let's discuss those
problems; AFAIK, this is the first package whose port insists on
having those tools installed.
Given these failures, I didn't try to build on plain DOS; let me know
if you would like me to do that anyway (I don't have Autoconf and
Automake on my DOS machine, either.)
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