Date: Thu, 1 Jan 1998 10:25:22 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Myknees <myknees AT aol DOT com>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: LD looks at zip drive
In-Reply-To: <19971231210800.QAA13854@ladder01.news.aol.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980101102419.6053B-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Precedence: bulk


On 31 Dec 1997, Myknees wrote:

> >You have free access to the sources and you still hack the binary?  I
> >guess some habits really die hard, do they?
> 
> You know, I got the sources, and after reading the "readme"s it seems like it
> would be so much easier to just "hack the binary" as you put it.

If we all would to take the ``easier'' path we would never have DJGPP,
and you could never use it the way you do now.  

DJGPP is about sharing the fruits of your work with others.  This
sharing works because people who fix a bug, introduce a feature, or
port another package, make their work available for others.  Sure, it
takes some effort to make things done so that you could share them.
But IMHO, this sharing is our way to give back to people that helped
create this software and made it run on MS-DOS/MS-Windows so you and I
could have it for free.

If you rebuild Binutils after correcting this problem, you could ask
DJ Delorie to upload the corrected distribution to SimTel.NET, where
others could then use it and avoid the problem which just took us few
days to identify and debug.  OTOH, hacking the binary fixes the things
for you alone (as long as you have drive C:, which some machines
don't).

> I don't have all the stuff you need to build LD.  I would need to
> find out what I'm missing, get it & install it.  Plus, most of the
> documentation assumes that you know how to use make.

Try this.  I think you should not have any problems at all except
installing the necessary utilities.  And I don't think you need to
know how to use Make; you just need to type "make [Enter]" (after
running the configuration script, as the instructions should tell
you).

> Is it dangerous to use LD after hacking it in this way, i.e.
> changing the "e:" to "c:"?
 
Not dangerous, just selfish (no offense intended).