Subject: Re: A new user of cygwin and unix based system
From: "'Chris Faylor'" <[email-masked]>
To: "McCunney, Dennis" <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 21:12:09 -0400

On Mon, Jun 28, 1999 at 11:38:21AM -0400, McCunney, Dennis wrote:
>First, you might wish to post a mini-FAQ here on a regular basis.  It
>doesn't have to be long and detailed: just a statement of the nature and
>purpose of the mailing list, names and email addresses of "official" folks
>like yourself with notes about your roles, and pointers to the appropriate
>FAQs and other resources.

There *is* a mini-FAQ posted on a regular basis by a volunteer.  We're very
grateful for Michael Weiser's contribution of the mini-FAQ.

>I got the impression from reading your posts here that you were officially
>involved with Cygwin, for instance, but this is the first post of yours
>signed with your title that I recall seeing.

Ok.  Is it important to post my title frequently?  The "who's who" information
is easily retrievable from the project web page (I just updated it with DJ's
and my titles).

>As the Cygwin tools grow in usage, you'll see more new folks popping up
>asking beginner questions who for whatever reason don't already know about
>the FAQ.  

And, if they do, either I or someone else will inevitably point them to the
FAQ just like on countless other mailing lists and newsgroups throughout the
internet.  I must be missing something here because you seem to be stating the
obvious and I don't know why.

>(I found out about this mailing list from a FAQ included with a cygwin
>distribution, but the address given for subscribing to the list was _wrong_,
>and bounced with an "unknown recipient" error.  I got pointed in the right
>direction by a chap on the NTEmacs mailing list.)

The mailing list address changed.  Here's the bounce message from
sending mail to the old mailing list address:

>Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 17:29:12 -0700 (PDT)
>From: [email-masked]
>To: [email-masked]
>Subject: Re: A test
>In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]>
>Precedence: junk
>X-Loop: [email-masked]
>
>Sorry, I am unable to deliver your mail note to [email-masked],
>that list name is no longer used.  Please try resending your mail 
>note to the new list name:  [email-masked].
>
>If you have any questions about this, send mail to [email-masked].
>This is a machine-generated message.
>
>Here is a copy of the note you sent.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>--
>[email-masked]
>http://www.cygnus.com/

I think the message is pretty clear.

>Second, please consider adding either a stand-alone info reader or a
>groff port to the distribution.  I understand your desire to reserve
>your energies for the more important parts of your effort, but since
>your documentation is distributed in nroff and info format, it isn't
>clear how someone who doesn't have emacs, an info reader, or groff
>installed is supposed to _read_ it.  (I installed NTEmacs and added
>your info files to the Emacs info tree.  I'm still SOL on the man pages
>- my Unix systems at the office don't have nroff installed, and booting
>to Linux at home to use groff is something I haven't had time to do.)

Maybe you haven't been reading the mailing list long enough to hear the
standard statement on why these tools exist.  Basically, the tools exist
because Cygnus uses them to port its GNUpro offering to Windows.  For
that purpose, we basically have everything we need.  It was realized
that these tools would be of some use to people on the Internet so they
were released as free software.

Although suggestions are always welcome (and this one has been repeated
countless times), we don't always have the time to polish up the release
and provide everything that users clamor for -- at least we don't have the
time to do it with any great alacrity.

So, what are your alternatives?  Are you SOL?  No.  You have a large
number of options.  Again, I would point you to the project web page.
If you peruse the Ported Software section, you'll undoubtedly find a man
reader.  Offhand, I don't see groff but I know it's been ported.  If
anyone wants to send me or DJ a pointer to a URL for download we'll add
it to the web page.

cgf

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