Subject: Re: Poor man's manpage reader for cygwin/ming
From: [email-masked] (Larry Hall)

20 Feb 1998 22:06:59 -0800
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To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

At 04:50 PM 2/20/98 GMT, [email-masked] wrote:
>>   Fabrizio Lodi ([email-masked])
>>   Thu, 19 Feb 1998 10:04:34 +0100
>>[email-masked] wrote:
>>>
>>> The following manpage reader script seems to work pretty well under
>>> cygwin, and is made of handy parts that are easily available and
>>> portable to cygwin.
>>>
>>> In this case, less-332 was compiled using mingwin32, since there was
>>> alternate code in the less-332 source distribution that lets you take
>>> advantage of mingwin's rtldll.dll library instead of the cygwin terminal.
>>> Compiling less-332 using cygwin results in a version of less.exe that
>>> issues diagnostic messages indicating _where_ the cygwin terminal is
broken.
>>> Also, zmore.exe seems to work well using `ln -s less.exe more.exe' as its
>>> version of more.exe.
>>> ========================================================================
>>>
>>> #!/bin/sh
>>> zmore $1 | nroff -man - | col | less
>>
>>To view man pages I've compiled without any problems thr groff package
>>from GNU (configured, compiled and installed through the provided
>>scripts and makefiles) and the standard distribution of man.
>>
>>As a pager I use less, that I've compiled whith any problem (of course,
>>after the compilation and installation of ncurses).
>>
>>Sure, it took near a day of work to be sure that all is working, but it
>>is worth the time spent.
>>--
>Fabrizio, I've been on other conferences in which people deliberately set
>out to lie about what is possible, and I think this is the case with you.
>I've implemented ncurses on cygwin, and it just doesn't work because of
>the cygwin terminal.  The only package that begins to work is the slang
>package with the Win32 extensions.  And, using less with ncurses should
>give you diagnostic messages about the cygwin terminal, and not the smooth,
>professional operation that defining `WINC32' and using MINGW32 to compile
>gives.  As for groff, you are an outright liar.  All the recent releases
>of groff crash the tar program under cygwin.  They cause `disk not ready'
>messages on the drive that tar was run under cygwin.  To get groff untarred,
>you have to reboot to Linux and use the Linux tar program.  And, groff uses
>a whole host of functions not available under cygwin.
>
>So, I repeat, Fabrizio, you are a liar.  Get off this conference.

I personally find this kind of comment disquieting.  To me, the rather
unrestrained personal attack is unwarranted from Fabrizio's original
post (perhaps I missed some previous flame in this thread???).  While I
consider myself a capable person, I wouldn't consider myself a top-notch
expert on all these tools in this environment or with GNU software in 
general.  Still, I was once able to untar and build groff in the past 
without too much difficulty.  And while I have since had a disk crash and 
lost most of that source, I was just now able to download groff-1_11a_tar.gz 
and untar it fine (perhaps this version is not "recent" enough??).  Also,
while I'll admit that I have yet to see terminal output be quite what I'd 
like in all situations, I've been able to compile and use ncurses 1.9.9g and
4.1 reasonable well with vim 5.0.  From my investigations, the problems I've 
seen in this area are due to bugs in winsup code (many of which are very 
likely fixed in b19) so its hard for me to put any blame on the ncurses
package either.  I would submit that it is unfair to attribute personal 
inabilities to perform these tasks or work out problems with these packages
to everyone on this list.  I'll be the first to admit that getting some of 
these packages to work can be some effort (especially when you start with 
little knowledge about what they are actually supposed to do for you and 
how to use them like I did), but a number of people on this list have gotten 
them to work adequately for them so it is possible.  I'd prefer to see less 
discussion about who is lying about what on this list and more about what 
specific things in this environment are problems for people.  That's the 
only way I can think of that people will be able to get better use of the 
tools in the future.

Forgive me if I've misinterpreted someone's reaction in this thread.  The
tone just seemed a little too harsh to me, at least for claims that, on
the surface, seem entirely unsubstantiated by my experience.

Larry Hall                              [email-masked]
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (781) 239-1053
8 Grove Street                          (781) 239-1655 - FAX
Wellesley, MA  02181                    http://www.rfk.com
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