To: perk AT gate DOT net
Cc: mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com (Mark Meyer), djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Definitive GNU fileutils ports 
Date: Sun, 16 Oct 94 09:30:00 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>

>  I'm not real sure just what the Backus ports are, but I've FTP'd the orig.
> fileutils and such from the Free Software Foundation, and they seemed to
> compile OK, with a few changes and a hand-tweaked makefile. Does anybody
> have suggestions as to where to FTP them to once I've put together the
> 'Diff' files and watt knot?

Beware of such simple-minded ports.  While most GNU (and otherwise Unix)
programs would compile without a single warning in DJGPP, they will refuse
to run under DOS in best case and will have subtle bugs in the worst.
Some reasons are:

	1) library functions which intentionally fail at run time (like
signal(), fork() and others).

	2) file I/O is different with text and binary files (try compiling
cp, then use it to copy a binary file, like .exe).

	3) DOS limitations and peculiarities, like 8.3 filenames, drive
letter as part of filename, etc.