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Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/11/01/09:54:53

Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 16:54:02 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: Ralph Proctor <ralphgpr AT shadow DOT net>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: "port"
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19981101083112.1c0ff2f6@shadow.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.981101164318.7786A-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ralph Proctor wrote:

> But when somebody says "I uploaded a port of ___________to djgpp" then 
> one would expect more.

You cannot realistically expect more than this: that the uploaded 
package will build in exactly the same environment as the one used 
by the porter.  Anything else requires either access to many different 
platforms, or a lot of time devoted to testing, or a lot of experience
in porting to DJGPP (usually, all of the above ;-).

The above might seem like an extreme, but I came to this conclusion 
based on several dozens of ports I've done in recent years.  It is just 
too damn hard to do a clean job that will work for everybody (even 
though, to my personal amazement, I seem to succeed in that lately).  
Anybody who tried knows that it takes several iterations to get things 
right; you might try this yourself some day to fully appreciate the 
amount of gotchas involved.

> But sometime in the future, IMHO, since this is a very good math
> accessory to EMACS, I do think the porting problem should be
> solved for DJGPP.

If you'd agree to do the mundane job of packaging and uploading this, I 
promise to help you get the Makefile to work.  It worked for me.

> A "Here's how I got _______________to work with DJGPP" put in the
> mail archives would do just as well.

This is a vast job, if done right.  (Simply listing all the hacks one 
needed to do just to make a package compile isn't my idea of such an 
entry.)

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