Date: Fri, 30 Jul 93 14:56:57 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: bob AT plk DOT af DOT mil
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Version Packaging

    The README (or maybe the README.1ST) starts with "GNU stands for
'GNU's NOT DOS'," or something perhaps a little more prosaic (and
accurate) than that.  It *is* a big, complex software system, and the
packaging needs to deal with several conflicting needs: some people
need only a minimal system, some people need everything, some people
need special components which replace the standard ones, you can't mix
DJGPP modules with Copyleft modules without everything coming under
the Copyleft, and '.zip' files need to be small enough to fit on
1.44MB floppies!  (Ooops: gcc241bn.zip is over the limit....)
    It has usually been true that if you re-download everything you 
for the previous version, then you'll have a complete package.  Once
in a while the packaging has changed.  However, as far as I know, it
has *always* been the case that if you simply

c:> ftp omnigate.clarkson.edu
   ... login procedure ...
ftp> cd /pub/msdos/djgpp
ftp> binary
ftp> mget *

you get everything you need for a complete package of the current
revision.  (I think that you can probably save a lot of source down-
loading with 'mget *.zip' now, since the source for gcc itself is now
in gzip-style '.z' files.)  If you want to save connect time, the
READMEs are pretty clear on which files you need.  I blew this one
myself once because my Internet connection crashed exactly between
files and I lost the last file, and didn't check that I'd got
everything.  That's not the README's fault....
    IMO, the solution has to be the *documentation*.  Unfortunately,
the docs are already pretty good, and people don't read them or
misunderstand them.  However, they can be improved.  Mea culpa---I
promised DJ about a million years ago (actually, last March) I'd work
on them.  (Well, I considered it a promise---DJ probably knows better
than to assume random strangers are reliable.  In extenuation, I did
do my taxes: US, Ohio and Japan, sell my house and car, buy a new
system which still isn't working right, move to Japan, and begin
preparing to teach a course on Pascal in Japanese which I first began
studying 3 years ago.)
    Having got all that off my chest
    (1) Does anybody have a good proposal for reorganizing the package
        to satisfy the constraints listed above (Copyleft, coff vs. 
        a.out linkers, etc)?  The docs need to be done, I think, but
        reorganizing the package could help if it's possible.
    (2) Is anybody working on the docs (besides DJ, of course.  Hats
        off to DJ!)?  I'm willing to make good on my promise, but until
        this Pascal course is completely prepared (hopefully Sept. 1, 
        the first meeting) I can only spend a few hours on it.  Some of
        that will have to be unpacking my DJGPP mailing list archives
        up to last July 1, they're tarred and gzipped on tape, and all
        of those are relatively unfamiliar to me.  Should be no problem:)