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Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1998/10/25/14:38:59

Message-ID: <36337C92.5840A031@montana.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 12:31:30 -0700
From: bowman <bowman AT montana DOT com>
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To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: proposed change to autoconf macro
References: <Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 981025193643 DOT 24396H-100000 AT is>
Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com


Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > As a general question, is there a list of packages and their
> > maintainers?
> 
> If you mean the GNU maintainer, then every package should have its
> address.  The easiest way to find it is to look inside ChangeLog for a
> person which did most of the latest changes.

I was thinking more in terms of the djgpp ports, but I would like to go
into this a little since my MC port is just about ready for prime time
and
I want to get it right.

Using autoconf, as an example, if one just downloads acnf212b.zip, as
many people
do who have no interest in the sources, all there is is 'readme.djg'
which references
Robert Hoehne as the person who did the dj port. The source zip does
have ChangeLog and
ChangeLog.1, but these are the original GNU authors and maintainers. 

OK, in this instance, I see two different areas. First, in the binary
djgpp package, there
is the acoldnames.m4 that has been truncated to acoldname.m4. BTW, this
is only in the
binary; acnf212s.zip is correct, as is the gnu tar.gz distribution.

This problem would seem to be specific to that one file, but it
obviously needs to be
cleaned up on all the simtel mirrors, etc. If one sees something like
that, is there
an appropriate person to contact, or is just posting to djgpp-workers
suffiecient?

The second area is a little cloudier in my mind. The patch to cause c:/
to be recognized
as a valid root is DOS specific, and of primary interest to the djgpp
community, but it
would be of interest to anyone porting autoconf to Cygwin, MinWg32, or
anything with
an underlying DOS filesystem, perhaps even the UMSDOS Linux variants.
Does this need
to be brought to the attention of the GNU maintainers, from ChangeLog?

Moving on to MC; because of the nature of this package, it is intimately
related to the
underlying file system. When porting it, I've discarded all of the vfs
funtionality, at
least for the moment, rewritten the way the whole chmod thing worked to
make it work for
DOS attributes, and numerous other textually small but conceptually
large changes. 

So, I've got a file manager that derives from the GNU 1.46. With a large
.diff file, the 
current slang package, and some renaming of files to 8.3 conventions, it
probably could be
reconstructed from GNU sources. The GNU maintainers are moving on with
the gnome project,
and probably have little interest in current distribution, but I'll
submit the diffs and
dj specific files to them.

However, I need the feedback on bugs, misfeatures, and requests for
changes on the package
specific to DOS. I've included my contact info in the readme.djg. Is
that sufficient, and does
that make me the maintainer of the djgpp version? 


On another note, a while back, I went looking for the dflat package. I'd
seen references to it
being on the djgpp sites, but couldn't find it, so I got the original
sources and ported it.
I haven't had a chance to test it exhaustively, but the included memopad
demo, which would seem 
to exercise most of the available library functions does compile and
run. This is public domain,
but is not GNU. Is that something that would be appropriate to have on
the djgpp site, or would
it be better to just put it on my website, and let people know it is
available, if they are interested?

Would MC be better only on my site, also? As I read the GPL, I can do
that and still comply, while
severing that particular version from the mainstream GNU. I ask that,
since I've been quite impressed with
MC, and would like to add features to it that are appropriate to DOS and
Windows, but will be of
no interest to the GNU community at large. The flip side, I don't
believe that the Gnome project
modifications will be of much use to the DOS world. Obviously, gcc,
binutils, grep, and the like 
can evolve to be of general use, but where does the line get drawn when
something gets platform
specific? For instance, do the _dpmi, _bios, _go32 type functions in the
djgpp package ever find their
way back to the GNU world, or are these maintained at the local level.

Sorry about all the questions, but I'm still trying to understand all
the mechanics. Philosophically,
I am really impressed by the GNU and FSF project, and want to make
appropriate contributions, but
it was much simpler to work on something in isolation and put the source
in
the public domain.

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