Re: Cygport user guide

[Doug Henderson <djndnbvg@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 09:56, marco atzeri via Cygwin-apps
<cygwin-apps@cygwin.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:23 PM Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via Cygwin-apps  wrote:
>> <snip>
>
> I suspect the user base is too small to justify the effort and I am afraid every
> major package needs a different approach.


 I find that I need an overview document to get me back up to speed
when I haven't used cygport for a while. The existing document, which
describes a very simple cygport file is a start, but stops way too
soon. I'd like to see a high level description of how cygport works.
If reading about some other packaging system would be helpful, I would
like to see a link to such documentation.

Recently, I used cygport to automate the building of an app that I
will probably never ITA (it compiles cleanly, runs fine, but does not
actually work on Windows). I knew it used cmake, but I had to grep
through setup.ini to find the packages that had a development
dependency on cmake, and get the source packages to figure out how
their cygport files worked. (It's just a one line change, but it needs
to be the right line!).

There is generated documentation, but it needs to be fleshed out to be
useful. Doing that, in an incremental fashion, might be a route to
make more helpful documentation. Uncharitably, that sounds like asking
one person to take on the bulk of the work. Perhaps those of us that
occasionally have to dig into the cygport code could git clone cygport
and make a personal branch to add some few words to any functions we
happen to study. Hopefully pull requests for comment only changes
should be easy to approve and merge.

Thoughts?

Doug

-- 
Doug Henderson, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - from gmail.com