Message-ID: <36337C92.5840A031@montana.com> Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 12:31:30 -0700 From: bowman X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5b2 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: proposed change to autoconf macro References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > As a general question, is there a list of packages and their > > maintainers? > > If you mean the GNU maintainer, then every package should have its > address. The easiest way to find it is to look inside ChangeLog for a > person which did most of the latest changes. I was thinking more in terms of the djgpp ports, but I would like to go into this a little since my MC port is just about ready for prime time and I want to get it right. Using autoconf, as an example, if one just downloads acnf212b.zip, as many people do who have no interest in the sources, all there is is 'readme.djg' which references Robert Hoehne as the person who did the dj port. The source zip does have ChangeLog and ChangeLog.1, but these are the original GNU authors and maintainers. OK, in this instance, I see two different areas. First, in the binary djgpp package, there is the acoldnames.m4 that has been truncated to acoldname.m4. BTW, this is only in the binary; acnf212s.zip is correct, as is the gnu tar.gz distribution. This problem would seem to be specific to that one file, but it obviously needs to be cleaned up on all the simtel mirrors, etc. If one sees something like that, is there an appropriate person to contact, or is just posting to djgpp-workers suffiecient? The second area is a little cloudier in my mind. The patch to cause c:/ to be recognized as a valid root is DOS specific, and of primary interest to the djgpp community, but it would be of interest to anyone porting autoconf to Cygwin, MinWg32, or anything with an underlying DOS filesystem, perhaps even the UMSDOS Linux variants. Does this need to be brought to the attention of the GNU maintainers, from ChangeLog? Moving on to MC; because of the nature of this package, it is intimately related to the underlying file system. When porting it, I've discarded all of the vfs funtionality, at least for the moment, rewritten the way the whole chmod thing worked to make it work for DOS attributes, and numerous other textually small but conceptually large changes. So, I've got a file manager that derives from the GNU 1.46. With a large .diff file, the current slang package, and some renaming of files to 8.3 conventions, it probably could be reconstructed from GNU sources. The GNU maintainers are moving on with the gnome project, and probably have little interest in current distribution, but I'll submit the diffs and dj specific files to them. However, I need the feedback on bugs, misfeatures, and requests for changes on the package specific to DOS. I've included my contact info in the readme.djg. Is that sufficient, and does that make me the maintainer of the djgpp version? On another note, a while back, I went looking for the dflat package. I'd seen references to it being on the djgpp sites, but couldn't find it, so I got the original sources and ported it. I haven't had a chance to test it exhaustively, but the included memopad demo, which would seem to exercise most of the available library functions does compile and run. This is public domain, but is not GNU. Is that something that would be appropriate to have on the djgpp site, or would it be better to just put it on my website, and let people know it is available, if they are interested? Would MC be better only on my site, also? As I read the GPL, I can do that and still comply, while severing that particular version from the mainstream GNU. I ask that, since I've been quite impressed with MC, and would like to add features to it that are appropriate to DOS and Windows, but will be of no interest to the GNU community at large. The flip side, I don't believe that the Gnome project modifications will be of much use to the DOS world. Obviously, gcc, binutils, grep, and the like can evolve to be of general use, but where does the line get drawn when something gets platform specific? For instance, do the _dpmi, _bios, _go32 type functions in the djgpp package ever find their way back to the GNU world, or are these maintained at the local level. Sorry about all the questions, but I'm still trying to understand all the mechanics. Philosophically, I am really impressed by the GNU and FSF project, and want to make appropriate contributions, but it was much simpler to work on something in isolation and put the source in the public domain.