Cygwin RCS Build Instructions (or sometimes ash does not like a.out)

[Jason Tishler]

I believe that I finally got to the bottom of why there are problems
building RCS on Cygwin.  It boils down to an idiosyncrasy of ash which
can be demonstrating by the following:

    $ cd /tmp
    $ cp /usr/bin/id.exe a.out
    $ sh -c ./a.out
    ./a.out: not found

Hence, ash will not execute programs when their full path is specified
and they don't end in ".exe".

The above behavior was causing RCS's src/conf.sh to fail because it
builds a.out files and attempts to run them via sh (i.e., ash) as
"./a.out".  Hence, conf.sh would get confused and finally abort.

My guess is that Andre did not experience the above because his /bin/sh
was really bash and not ash.

The following is my Cygwin RCS build procedure:

1. tar -xzvf rcs-5.7.tar.gz

2. cd rcs-5.7

3. patch -p1 <rcs-5.7-cygwin-1.patch

4. patch -p1 <rcs-5.7-cygwin-2.patch

5. configure

6. make

7. make install

8. make installcheck

Notes:

1. See attachments for the above patches.

2. rcs-5.7-cygwin-1.patch is identical to the one that Andre Oliveira
da Costa posted in:

   http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2000-08/msg00618.html .

3. There are alternatives to using rcs-5.7-cygwin-2.patch:

   a. (temporarily) replace ash with bash (i.e., cp /bin/bash /bin/sh)
   b. fiddle with "mount -x" so that "sh -c ./a.out" works as expected

4. make installcheck did not report any errors.  But, unfortunately the
way that it was written required me to run it after make install and
not before as one would expect.

Jason

-- 
Jason Tishler
Director, Software Engineering       Phone: +1 (732) 264-8770 x235
Dot Hill Systems Corporation         Fax:   +1 (732) 264-8798
82 Bethany Road, Suite 7             Email: Jason.Tishler@dothill.com
Hazlet, NJ 07730 USA                 WWW:   http://www.dothill.com