🚀 go-pugleaf

While I know that generally VM is not supported on strange M$ systems,
some of us have to live it.  So, I have a few suggestions that I think
will be helpful, but aren't too M$ specific.  This is for Windows-NT
and MKS and Emacs 21.1.

First, I tried to download the vm.elc file from the Wonderworks
download page.  Until later, I forgot that the ELC format for Emacs is
different than XEmacs.  You might want to rearrange the download page
to make that more obvious so that people don't download the wrong
version of the ELC.

Second, I also wanted the Info file(s) for VM so that I have the
manual to refer when needed.  This wasn't directly on the download
page, but was in the "browse".  You might want to mention this on the
download page as well.

BTW, you might also include the VM version number *in* the Info manual
so that people know which version of VM the manual applies to.  That's
useful when you're installing things piecemeal to ensure that you
don't get two versions of VM mixed up together.

I found that bbdb-insinuate-vm (BBDB 2.32) expects to find
vm-autoloads, so I had to download the sources to VM after all.
You might want to let the BBDB people know if there is a better way of
loading (and insinuating into) VM.

After downloading the sources, the first step is to modify the
Makefile.  I'd suggest moving the SHELL definition above the user
configurable line as sometimes the shell that people want to use (even
on UNIX systems) is not /bin/sh.  I'd also suggest putting in a
commented out setting for CC and CFLAGS above the user configurable
line so that people know they *may* need to modify it.  I'd also put
into the Makefile an EXE macro that will be defined to "" on UNIX and
".exe" on Windows.  With that you could change the definition of the
UTILS to include the EXE macro as in "qp-decode$(EXE)" (also any
appropriate Makefile targets).

Finally, in the target to build vm-autoload.elc, you do a "tr -d" to
remove CRs from the file, but then you add the "provide" line to the
end of the file.  On my system, the echo terminated each line with
CRLF, so this line cause a premature EOF in the parsing.  You need to
move the "tr" command.

One problem that I haven't totally figured out is that the MKS make
command seems to have problems with globbing filenames (ie. expanding
"file*" into a list of files).  I'll have to play with that some to
see why, because it should work.  You might want to change from using
"file*" to using "$(FILES)" and, thus, be more explicit about which
files you expect to be there.

-- 
David Masterson                David DOT Masterson AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA