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.

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.

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.

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:

• 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.