btw, THANKS!

[Greg A. Woods]

I don't think I've sent you a great big THANK YOU for the 3.06 version
of Lout yet!

It is a most significant improvement over earlier releases I was using,
particularly on the documentation side!  I'm also very happy that the
filenames have been adjusted, even if it was for the sake of MS-DOS.
Fortunately I too no longer use any systems that have such restrictions
(at least not on a daily basis), though I'm glad I have the option of
putting Lout on them.  The new "mydefs" feature is higly useful, though
for many documents I'm still stuck with defining a custom format, since
some features I need to change in a more flexible way, such as page
headers and footers, heading fonts, etc., are not exported from
DocumentLaout and ReportLayout.  It would be nice if all parameters were
so exported, but perhaps it's not possible due to implementation
limitations?

I was at first somewhat stymied by the occasional use of the so called
"new" ANSI-C function defintion parameter style in the new release.  I
most definitely hate that "feature" of ANSI-C as does my SunOS C
compiler, but, thankfully, there are tools that can come to my rescue.
I was able to install Lout almost flawlessly once I installed unproto
and made the appropriate modifications to the Makefile.

Here are the makefile changes that were necessary to run with unproto:

! CC    = /usr/5bin/cc
  
! COPTS = -g -Qpath /local/lib/unproto -I/local/include/unproto
! LOPTS = -g

+ LFLAGS        = $(LOPTS)

|       $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o lout $(OBJS) -lm

It was also necessary to either always run "make uninstall" prior to
each install, or to prefix all the calls to 'mkdir' with '-'.  I also
changed all the 'cp' commands that copy entire directory contents to be
like this:

!       cp `ls -d include/* | sed -e '/CVS/d' -e '/SCCS/d' -e '/RCS/d'` 
$(LIBDIR)/include

thus avoiding any subdirectories that may be created by a source code
control system.

I do have one small patch necessary to quiesce my C compiler, which I
include here [the identifier "size" seemed to clash another, or perhaps
with a keyword]:

=== cd /home/most/woods/work.d/lout/
=== cvs -d /local/src-CVS diff -c z46.c

Index: z46.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /local/src-CVS/misc/lout/z46.c,v
retrieving revision 1.1.1.2
diff -c -r1.1.1.2 z46.c
*** z46.c       1995/08/04 20:31:53     1.1.1.2
--- z46.c       1996/01/16 06:45:00
***************
*** 228,239 ****
  }
  
  static void
! xfwrite (buf, size, nelem, fp)
       char *buf;
!      int size, nelem;
       FILE *fp;
  {
!   if (fwrite (buf, size, nelem, fp) != nelem)
      {
        sort_error ("write error");
        exit (2);
--- 228,239 ----
  }
  
  static void
! xfwrite (buf, len, nelem, fp)
       char *buf;
!      int len, nelem;
       FILE *fp;
  {
!   if (fwrite (buf, len, nelem, fp) != nelem)
      {
        sort_error ("write error");
        exit (2);


Perhaps this patch is only necessary for SunOS C, or maybe it was posted
to the list in the past, but I missed it....

Oh, and BTW, the last run when building the user's guide was timed as
follows on my Sun3/260 w/32Mb RAM, lout compiled only with '-g':

        real    27:10.5
        user    21:50.7
        sys      2:17.4

Now that I've proven it is free so far from SIGSEGV's, etc., I'll
re-compile with optimisation turned on!  ;-)

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734                 VE3TCP                  robohack!woods
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