Buglist

[Tim Iverson <iverson at cisco dot com>]

Well, things work now, but if you've also been having problems self-hosting
a build under Windows-95, note that it's rather important to extract
the all tarball with the Cygwin32 tar, and not some other tar.

I have three different tars, and all of them skip over hard links when
extracting 'cuz W95 doesn't support 'em.  Normally, one might catch this
right away when running configure -- missing commands and such.  However,
my system is sufficiently Unix-like that this didn't happen.  Instead I got
all manner of strange behavior.

It would be *very* nice if Cygnus could maintain a public buglist for this
project (buglist and FAQ should be a part of the all tarball).  I don't
know about the rest of y'all, but my first thought before I even decided to
download anything, was "Wow, this sounds great, but what doesn't work?"  ;-)

Here are the few caveats I've collected so far (btw, not all of these
are bugs, but all are odd enough to note):

 . Proper extraction of tarballs requires Cygwin32's tar.exe -- other
   tar's may not extract the hard links.

 . Control-C will always crash bash.

 . Bash does not interoperate well with non-cygnus tools, especially when
   piping or arg-sub'ing; eg. try ">foo; test 0 -eq `grep -c . foo`" with
   any working, but non-cygnus, grep.

 . Gas produced PE objects cannot be linked with a commercial linker;
   there is a patch for this, though.

 . Don't put your source more than two levels deep or configure
   will not function properly.  [Not completely verified, could
   also have been a tar extraction error].

 . Bash can't run many .com programs and won't automatically feed
   .bat files to command.com.

 . Bash doesn't understand drive letters, multi-dot relative paths
   (eg. "cd ..."), or UNC pathnames (eg. //host/resource).

 . Bash's glob'ing is case dependent, W95's filesystem isn't (quite).

 . You will need to copy gcc.exe to cc.exe to build gcc.exe.
   Passing CC=gcc to configure may also work.

 . "make install" is broken.  You will need to hunt down and manually
   install the binaries if you rebuild.

 . It has man and info pages, but neither man nor info commands.


- Tim Iverson
  iverson@cisco.com
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