# readme. - for the GNUish MS-DOS library			-*-Text-*-
# Copyright (C) 1990 by Thorsten Ohl, td12@ddagsi3.bitnet

This library contains MS-DOS ports of GNU library routines and other
support routines for MS-DOS.

The reason for distributing this files separately is to provide one
`definitive' version of them.  In the GNU distributions, several versions
of this modules float around.  This is particularily problematic in the
case of the regexp library, since this needs some changes to run smoothly
on 16-bit machines.  Thus I would have to maintain several patches for the
different programs.  For example the regexp distributed with e?grep is
really antique, patches for it are not very similar to those for the
regexp library from the fileutils.

This library also contains some files which do not need any changes at
all, they're here, because they are oth general use and naturally fit
into this library.

The final component of this library are some MS-DOS support functions.


SHORT DESCRIPTION:

      *	error.c, getopt.c, getopt.h, getopt1.c, glob.c, regex.c, regex.h:
	General purpose GNU functions, needed by almost all GNU programs.
	The MS-DOS Version is identical to or derived from the version
	distributed with the fileutilities (Version 1.4, excpet glob.c
	which is from v1.3).

      *	patches: these patches can be used to recover the original
	versions (for finding out, what I've broken ...).

      * _cwild.c:
	Commandline expansion.

      * ndir.c, ndir.h:
	Portable directory access.

      * pwd.c, pwd.h:
	No-op replacements for getuid (), etc.
	These functions are not really useful, but are convenient for
	avoiding extensive conditionalization of the GNU sources.

      * gnulib.h:
	Some prototypes.

      * xmalloc.c, xrealloc.c:
	It's useful to have them around ...


OMISSIONS:

      *	This library should contain a version of the obstack macros for
	all memory models.  I do not have such a version.


