Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 12:25:35 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Shawn Hargreaves cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Can we vote on letting RSXNTDJ rest in peace? In-Reply-To: <8D53104ECD0CD211AF4000A0C9D60AE3015DAC7C@probe-2.acclaim-euro.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Tue, 31 Aug 1999, Shawn Hargreaves wrote: > The ideal thing would IMHO be to put together a djgpp-style > environment (ie. a single centralised distribution with ports of all > the major Unix tools) on top of Mingw32. But that is a huge task, and > as long as nobody has done it, RSXNTDJ works pretty well today. I'd rather think that this task is not as huge as it might seem. In the first approximation, just going through the DJGPP-ported sources and adding #ifdef _WIN32 to every #ifdef __MSDOS__ would probably make for a very useful set of tools. Some replacements for library functions are probably due (since the DJGPP ports rely heavily on some hidden library features), but DJGPP library sources are free, so that part shouldn't be too hard, too. Once that is done, the next step would be to selectively enable features that DJGPP doesn't support, like multiple jobs in Make, perhaps some kind of job control in Bash, support for SIGWINCH, etc. If these are added as the needs arise, not in one large bulk like Cygwin does, then you'd still have a ``minimal'' development system that is useful on its own. It does require a couple of dedicated individuals to make this happen, but given the path charted by DJGPP, it should be nowhere as hard as it was in our case. (Typically, each of the packages that are central to the DJGPP environment, like Make, Bash and Fileutils, took about two major ports and 2 to 3 years elapsed to get right.) > Quite. I never had a problem with installing it, though: I just > followed the very clear instructions in the manual, and it worked. I have no doubt ;-). But then people like you are not a good test case for installation instructions. That's why the DJGPP installation instructions are still constantly reworked, although no one of the developers have ever had any problems following the original DJ's README.1ST, and even though complaints from newbies, including the infamous -lstdcx problem, don't come anywhere near the flood of problems with installing RSXNTDJ. > It would be nice if > there was some way to have both linkers installed at once and use > a compiler switch to decide which one to run, or failing that, > the installation instructions should be updated to warn people > about these problems, and tell them how to manually switch between > the two linkers. Better still, a compilation driver could be written to do that automatically. Or perhaps even some magic in lib/specs would be enough to pull out that trick.