Problems with slang?

[Jeffrey Juliano]

Hi, I'm catch up skimming old cygwin mail...

On Oct 27, 2000 11:57 AM -0400 "Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" wrote:

> At 11:47 AM 10/27/2000, Charles Krug wrote:
>> Hello List:
>>
>> I'm playing with a package that requires slang.
...
>> slang has instructions on building against Cygwin, which I follow:
...
> CYGWIN32 is no longer a valid define to indicate CYGWIN.  Use CYGWIN
...
> not  before.  Unless someone else has been maintaining this port since
> that time, I'd say the build instructions you have are a bit out-of-date.

I successfully build both slang and slrn earlier this summer.  I have a 
working slrn, sans slrnpull, that hasn't had one problem in 3 months of use.

Neither built OOTB.  I don't remember offhand what I did to compile. 
Submitting a patch to the author was on my todo list when I got a new job 
and disappeared for a few months (and will continue to be invisible for at 
least one month more).

Let's see, I think you need to at least change all CYGWIN32 references to 
CYGWIN.  There's a comment in the readme that cygwin is a win32 platform 
(in the eyes of the author) and not a unix platform.  I dismissed that as 
relative to older cygwin, and I instead just built as a unix platform.  The 
resulting slang/slrn is a real cygwin app that understands cygwin mount 
table and symlinks.

BTW, for external viewer you can get xv to build under cygwin, too, with a 
little effort.  Another one on my dusty todo list.

So, yes, it can be done.  I just glanced at my config.status.  The only 
option to configure I used for both slang and slrn was --prefix.  ls tells 
me that the other files I modified were

  Makefile, slrnfeat.h, sltcp in the slrn/src dir

I've attached diffs against the backups that emacs generated.  These are 
not proper patch file.  hope they help.  I don't have the orig Makefile 
handy, so no diff for that one.  If I ever find the time, I intend to clean 
up my hacks and submit a patch to the slrn maintainer.  Feel free to use my 
mods.

hmmm, now I"m not sure that I changed CYGWIN32 to CYGWIN.  Perhaps leaving 
it alone was a trick to get these to build as a unix system.  I think the 
source might use win32 API when it detects cygwin.

-jeff