Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT sources DOT redhat DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT sources DOT redhat DOT com Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 17:32:05 -0800 (PST) From: Brian Enigma X-Sender: enigma AT euclid To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Several Suggestions... Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I am not sure where to direct this message. It looks, to me, that the Cygwin mailing list would get these suggestions out to the appropriate people (and possibly to a bunch of people who might not care). Anyway, I have been using Unix for at least a decade and Cygwin for the past year or so. While Cygwin is absolutely wonderful, I do have a wish list containing a few items of varying importance. The list follows: * The whois command (http://freshmeat.net/projects/whois/), surprisingly, seems to be missing from Cygwin. I was able to grab the tarball, compile, and install it from this particular whois project without any problem or modifications. * Netcat (sorry, cannot find a link) is a really useful tool that I tend to use a lot. * Most Unix Perl packages ship with a script called "rename" that will rename files based on a regular expression (example: rename 's/ /_/g' *.mp3). I was able to copy this directly from a Debian box onto a Cygwin box and have it run without problem. There may be other useful "standard" Perl scripts, as well. * Only once have I found the ZModem sz and rz commands useful (http://freshmeat.net/projects/rzsz/). They were a bitch to compile properly under Cygwin because of Makefile problems. I doubt most people will need them. * Can you really say a system is complete without a port of the best curses-based RPG from the 80's: NetHack? Nevermind... * The tcsh configuration is very lacking. I tend to use tcsh, instead of bash, on Unix boxes. Cygwin's bash ships with a decent /etc/profile file that makes it usable. It does not ship with any sort of /etc/csh.cshrc or /etc/csh.login, which makes tcsh fairly unusable "out of the box" without a lot of configuration. I have yet to sit down and spend the time to do this config myself, and I am sure many others are in the same boat. * Speaking of /etc/profile--when I last used Redhat, a few years ago, I remember it featuring *.local files. The packaged files like /etc/profile had as the last line in their scripts something like "if [ -f /etc/profile.local ]; then; . /etc/profile.local; fi". You would put all of your customizations in the .local file so that when the package got updated, your changes would not get clobbered or diff'ed incorrectly. I can probably help with creating some of the new packages (maybe not maintenance, though...) if work has not already been started. Although I have zero experience making packages as such, the instructions seem straightforward. License differences may or may not be an issue. Modifications to the existing packages (e.g. tcsh or Perl) seems a little less straightforward. These are merely suggestions based on my personal experience. Heed or ignore at your convienence. -E -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine iD8DBQE79w+Y0dKNWt3rpSURAsHoAKDq4oQSG2m3pYemcPuh7npcaE+MYwCghJja doiOs2rI7FBFMuQluJ8pmcQ= =K0ea -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/