From: myknees AT aol DOT com (Myknees)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: LD looks at zip drive
Date: 1 Jan 1998 16:46:11 GMT
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Message-ID: <19980101164601.LAA18023@ladder01.news.aol.com>
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References: <Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 980101102419 DOT 6053B-100000 AT is>
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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In article <Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 980101102419 DOT 6053B-100000 AT is>, Eli Zaretskii
<eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> writes:

On 31 Dec
>1997, Myknees wrote:
>> 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.  

Well said.

>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).

Honestly, it never occured to me that anyone other than veterans could do stuff
like that.  It is a bit odd to think of lots of people using binutils that I
compiled here on my computer.  

However, you have convinced me, and you are very right in your ethic.  I do
appreciate the effort that goes into creating and maintaining all the djgpp
stuff.  It does make sense that I could take the trouble to get the stuff
(fileutils, textutils, sed, bash, etc.) and install them & them build the
binutils.

I was not kidding, though-- this is going to be a lot of work, since I know
nothing about all this stuff.  Heck, I don't even have "patch.exe."  And I'm
going back to work, starting tomorrow, so it will probably be quite a while
before I get anything done.  If you're up for it, I may even email you (Eli
Zaretskii) if I get really stuck.  

[snipped me complaining about not having stuff already]
>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).

I will try that once I get the utilities installed.

> 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).

None taken.  Selfishness is something almost everyone has in some form.  It is
good when someone else points it out in a constructive way.

--Ed (Myknees)