To: Gordon Hogenson <ghogenso AT u DOT washington DOT edu>
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Definitive GNU fileutils ports 
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 09:21:36 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>

> 1. I know ports exist, but have the patches for MSDOS/DJGPP been
>    contributed to the FSF?  Are these patches now part of the
>    standard distribution fileutils-x.x.tar.gz ?

AFAIK, the patches are *not* part of any official GNU Fileutils
distribution.

> 2. If not, what different ports of the fileutils exist, 
>    where can they be obtained, and what differences are there
>    among them?  I recall a debate about using O_TEXT or

There is a port of a (very old) version 1.4 of fileutils to 16-bit
Microsoft C compiler, by Thorsten Ohl as part of the GNUish MS-DOS
project.  I use it now for 4 years, and am quite happy with them.
This port has the text/binary issue solved quite good (some utilities,
like cp and mv, just read and write in binary mode, others have special
switches to tell them what to do).

There is also a port of Fileutils 3.2 to DJGPP 1.08 by Eric Backus.  I
forgot where I got this one, but I still have the .zoo archive.  Never
quite used this, so can't tell you how it solves the above issue.

> 3. Comments on the interaction of the fileutils with GO32's command line 
>    globbing and with GNU make would also be appreciated, e.g.
>    behavior with respect to backslashes, slashes, wildcards,
>    drive letters, etc.

The GNUish port has its own globbing, which is done with GNU fnmatch()
function.  The only differences from what you know from Unix machines
are: double quotes should be used for quoting arguments, and backslash
cannot quote a newline.  The drive letters and the d:*.* meaning really
d:./*.* is supported, e:*/* means all files in all 1st-level directories
of e:, etc.  Just like you would think.

> 4. Any comments on the reliability of various ports would also
>    be appreciated... (e.g. how much 'stress testing' they have
>    undergone).

Does 4 years of everyday usage qualify as ``stress testing''?  Not a
single complaint I have to report.  So the only downside is this is
a *really* old version.  I'm playing with the idea of porting the
latest version of Fileutils to DJGPP, but didn't find the time yet.
Sigh...

	EZ