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email address confusion


        >>Btw, please do not send email to cygwin-support@cygnus.com.  
        >>That is for customers who have purchased the cygwin product.

Well ... I AM a customer who has purchased the cygwin product.

If that were all I had to say, I wouldn't have bothered saying it. I am
responding to suggest that you (cygwin) could do a few simple things to
improve on publicizing/documenting the various email addresses (and the
purpose of each), and the URL to "The Cygwin Project mailing list archives".

I spent considerable time trying to figure out what address(es) to email my
report to. Contrary to your statement above, page 21 of the (hardcopy)
Cygwin 1.0 manual says "Users without valid registration who have problems
installing or using the Cygwin software can email questions or reports to
the cygwin-support@cygnus.com address". Then on page 34 (in a section titled
"Cygwin and its History") it says "If you are not a registered user, send
questions to the project's mailing list (email:
cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com)." [ Similar statements can be found in the
Cygwin support web pages: http://support.cygnus.com/cygwin/1_GS/ins03.html
and http://support.cygnus.com/cygwin/1_GS/int02.html#WhatsCygwin ]. Other
email address I came across, with little or no explanation as to their
purposes: info@cygnus.com, faq@cygnus.com,
cygwin-info@sourceware.cygnus.com, cygwin-faq@sourceware.cygnus.com.


Furthermore, it's NOT a trivial task to find the email address of the cygwin
mailing list. The FAQ page
(http://support.cygnus.com/cygwin/cygwin-faq.html) has a section with
instructions on how to (un)subscribe, but that section doesn't give the
list's email address. When I subscribed to the cygwin digest list, I got 2
emails which included instructions on how to (un)subscribe, but the list's
email address was never mentioned. And if you're fortunate enough to have
stumbled across the URL for the email archive main page
(http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ml/cygwin/), you won't find the email address
there either (unless you dig down a level). And when you go to the email
archive and look at one of the messages, it shows "To: <cygwin at sourceware
dot cygnus dot com>" as the address (which is a clue, if you know the
answer). 

Now that I know the email address, I've searched for it. I found it in the
FAQ pages in a section titled "Is it free software?" (not the first place I
would have looked), and in the README file that ended up in the same
subdirectory in which I downloaded/ran the cygwin setup.exe program. I also
found it in a few other places, none of which were obvious places to look.

Here's my suggestion of places where the cygwin email address should be
found
- in the manual (and corresponding web pages) in the section titled "How to
Contact Cygnus".
- in the FAQ pages, in the section titled "What Cygwin mailing lists can I
join?", and other places where instruction are provided for subscribing to
the list.
- in the confirmation emails that come as a result of subscribing to the
list(s).
- (It would be helpful if each of the above places also gave the URL to the
archive).
- on the top level archive web page
(http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ml/cygwin/).


Regards,
Scott Carter


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Faylor [mailto:cgf@cygnus.com]
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 06:27 PM
To: cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com
Cc: Scott Carter
Subject: Re: make win32 chokes on lone tab


On Fri, Jun 23, 2000 at 05:01:39PM -0600, Scott Carter wrote:
>We were having some real frustrating problems with make, but eventually
>(by chance) tracked the problem down to this: If the final (or any)
>command in a rule is an "empty command" (as it's referred to in the
>documentation)(that is, the line begins with a tab, but is otherwise
>empty -- which, in most editors, looks like a blank line), make will
>terminate with a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION error.

This was very easy to track down.  Running the program under gdb
immediately uncovered the problem.

I will be making a new release of make-3.79-2 shortly.

Btw, please do not send email to cygwin-support@cygnus.com.  That
is for customers who have purchased the cygwin product.

cgf

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