astksh review

[Elfyn McBratney]

>I started composing a response a fews days ago and got
>sidetracked, but it was along the same lines:
>
>The cygwin astksh package does what it advertises -- it
>builds ksh93 on cygwin.  The source is all there, but the
>build environment is mainly for bootstrapping, not
>development.
>
>If you want to twiddle the source and do incremental
>builds then download and build the ast-base package in
>/opt/ast, following the generic source instructions.
>After it installs you can run the ast nmake from any
>directory that contains a Makefile.  nmake takes
>care of recursive subdir ordering.
>
>For those who equate different with painful: get the
>aspirin out. Source miners will have to step out of all
>that is gnu -- configure automake autoconf libtool.
>The main difference is that the ast Makefiles are
>source -- all config-type generation, prerequisite scanning,
>conditional selection, local compilation conventions, etc.,
>happen as a direct consequence of running the ast
>nmake.  Detailed discussion is welcome at
>
>	ast-users@research.att.com
>
>Finally, to reinforce Karsten's reply, we won't retrofit
>automake etc. We have source configuration
>managment in place that has basically the same form
>now as it did in 1990.
>
>-- Glenn

Sorry this was probably my fault. When I mentioned build instructions, what 
I meant was some "unpack foo do bar" sort of thing in an 
/usr/doc/Cygwin/astksh.README . This will help if people/users that want to 
re-build the package from source, and it also follows the Cygwin README 
convention (even if it doesn't get read ;-). All it should need is the steps 
to build from source and perhaps build the packages, too (in addition to 
what's already there).

BTW, It might have looked like I lost interest in this, I didn't, just lost 
my e-mail address ;-)

Elfyn

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