Date:	Sun, 12 Apr 1998 11:47:05 +0300 (IDT)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	Ross Smith <ross DOT smith AT pobox DOT com>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Does a port of sharutils-4.2 (uuencode) exist?
In-Reply-To:	<352D20C2.621335D7@pobox.com>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.980412114647.3322D-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Ross Smith wrote:

> Is there a port and if not, does anyone have any suggestions how to best
> port sharutils using djgpp?  It will be my first port.

To the best of my knowledge, shar-utils were not ported to DJGPP.

If you are not sure what does porting a package involve, I suggest
looking into a couple of source distributions inside v2gnu directory.
Typically, there are several issues to be resolved:

   1) Source code changes.  These are necessary to make Unix-born
      software work correctly on MS-DOS/MS-Windows.  Some things to
      look for include:

      - using binary I/O for non-text files;
      - support for DOS file names with drive letters and backslashes,
	as well as forward slashes;
      - assumptions that `read' and `fread' return the same number of
	bytes as what `stat' returns for the file size.

   2) The configuration procedure.  On Unix, this involves running a
      shell script called `configure'.  This will run on MSDOS as
      well, using the excellent port of Bash, but the script will need
      some small modifications to run correctly.  Several source
      distributions of DJGPP ports in v2gnu include examples for
      modified scripts which work.  See v2gnu/fil316s.zip for one such
      example.  This approach requires to install most of the
      auxiliary packages from v2gnu, since the `configure' script runs
      many utilities from those packages.

      Alternatively, you could throw together a Sed script to replace
      the `configure' script.  This requires much less utilities to be
      installed, but you will need a good knowledge of Sed to craft
      the Sed script.  See v2gnu/pat25s.zip, for one example of this
      approach.

   3) Last, but not least, there are some packaging hassles.  You need
      to make sure the package will build on platforms which support
      long file names (such as Windows 9X) and those which don't (such
      as DOS and Windows 3.X).  So you need to create a zip file where
      the long names are preserved, and tweak some of the names such
      that they will work correctly after truncation to 8+3 limits.
      For example, file names like Makefile.in.in need to be changed
      into something like Makefile.in-in, and foobar.info-1 needs to
      be changed into foobar.i1.

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