Cyclic page for Programming with GNU Software

The book Programming with GNU Software is an introduction to the GNU software development tools running on UNIX. The book has chapters concerning emacs, GCC, GDB, RCS, and make, and also covers related subjects like profiling.

The CD-ROM which accompanies the book includes a copy of CVS as well as the tools mentioned above, including executables for six unix platforms.

Ordering Information

Order this book from Fatbrain.com (order via email, paper mail, or web; pay via credit card, check, or wire transfer).

Order this book from Amazon.com (place the order online, pay via credit card or check).

Note that you must give Amazon your email address and by default they will send you advertisements in the future. If you don't want this, after ordering send mail to no-news-a@amazon.com. The first line of your mail should be "unsubscribe" and the email address that you want removed should be on the next line.

CVS documentation on the book's CD-ROM

The documentation for CVS is on the CD-ROM which comes with the book, but it requires some explanation. The manual you are looking for is Version Management with CVS by Per Cederqvist et al; it is about 160 pages long.

The manual is available in several formats:

Adobe PostScript

Ask the disc's installation script for sources; it will install the rcs-5.7-opt.tar.gz archive, which contains the file cvs-1.8.1/doc/cvs.ps. The manual is formatted for A4 size paper; if you print it on US letter size paper, typically the page numbers will be cut off. The CD-ROM does not contain a version formatted for US letter size paper, but see the Texinfo files, below.

info

info is the GNU system's format for on-line documentation. The GNU Emacs development environment contains a browser for info files; there is also a stand-alone browser program.

Ask the disc's installation script for sources and info files. It will ask you where to install sources and info files, and will unpack the archives rcs-5.7-opt.tar.gz and rcs-5.7-info.tar.gz, respectively, into those directories. However, the file cvs.info gets installed in the wrong place. You will find it in cvs-1.8.1/doc/ within the directory where you asked the installation script to install the sources. You need to move it to the directory containing the info files, alongside cvs.info-n (where n is 1 through 6) which should have been placed there by the installation script.

Texinfo

The sources for the manuals are in Texinfo format, from which you can build on-line documentation or a PostScript file for printing. Ask the disc's installation script for sources; it will install the archive rcs-5.7-opt.tar.gz, from which you should extract cvs-1.8.1/doc/cvs.texinfo.

Errata

The version of CVS supplied is 1.8 (also known as 1.8.1). Most of the known bugs in 1.8 are relatively obscure (depending, of course, on your definition of obscure).

One erratum is that manpages are missing from the CD-ROM. If you ask to install manpages for RCS and related programs, it installs rcs-5.7-man.tar.gz which is supposed to contain manpages but instead contains a second copy of the sources (rcs-5.7-opt.tar.gz). This is not as serious as it might sound, because for many purposes the CVS documentation described above, or chapter 8 of the book (if you are using RCS instead of CVS), is the documentation of choice. If you want the manpages they can be had, although not from the book's CD-ROM (see Getting Help below).

Correction in installation script for Programming with GNU Software, from the publisher, provides some additional information about installing GCC and emacs from the book's CD-ROM.

Chocolate

In honor of the release of the book, we had this chocolate design done based on the cover of the book. In addition to the image to the left, of Jim Kingdon holding the chocolate, there is also a JPEG of the chocolate alone, and the original TIFF (in case anyone needs it in that format--520k bytes).

Related Pages

The following pages describe paid support, mailing lists and newsgroups, related books, and other information about the software described in Programming with GNU Software:

• CVS, described on our home page, a version control tool which supports branching, multiple developers, and remote collaboration.
• RCS, a simpler version control tool which operates on one file at a time.
• GCC compiler for C and C++ (also the GDB debugger).
• Emacs editor/environment.

Bureaucracy

Fatbrain.com requires us to display their logo: