Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:10:30 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii To: mschulter AT mach1 DOT mpu DOT com Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Learning to use make In-Reply-To: <53c0tq$5on@news.mpu.com> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On 7 Oct 1996 mschulter AT mach1 DOT mpu DOT com wrote: > Here's a beginner's question: how much C should I know before trying > to do for a program like GNUchess what CONFIG.BAT does automatically > for Emacs 19.31 and higher? Most of the work is NOT writing the configure batch file; it's porting the package to MSDOS. You *must* know C for this part, else you won't know how to change the program so it works on MSDOS. You must also understand what the program does (also quite impossible without working C knowledge), and how to express certain things which won't work on MSDOS as they do on Unix. Once you have a source that compiles and runs on MSDOS, it's a fairly simple job to either write a Sed script that edits the Makefile so it doesn't require a Unixy shell to run, or just prepare a DOS-specific Makefile and let configur.bat rename it to Makefile. Note that I didn't actually look into the sources of GNUChess, so I might completely miss the point. In particular, it may be that GNUChess is already ported to MSDOS, in which case the amount of work is minimal.