[net.emacs] Problems with VMS GNU Emacs?

sci@kestrel.ARPA (Mike Liveright) (10/09/86)

I just got GNU EMACS 18.25 thru a friend and started to try to compile it. At
this point I am dead in the water. Any suggestions? The following are my
notes as to how far I am:

	0) I did copied "[dist-18.25.src]config.h-dist" to "config.h" 
and "vaxspaths.h" to "paths.h" as specified, and then edited, I think,
"config.h" to say I was runing VMS4_4.

	1) There is a file "[dist-18.25.gdb]vax.opcode.h" that has too
many periods to be a legal VMS file. I hope that it is not important, what
is the "gdb" directory anyway? If it is important, I am sure that I will be
able to find what refers to it later.

	2) The command procedure "[dist-18.25.src]compile.com" calls 
"precomp.com" which defines "ccom" as "@compile", and then the "compile.com"
calls "ccom". This is recursive, and fails. I think that "precomp.com" should
be corrected to define: "$ ccom :== @ccom.com". I did it and then it seemed
to start compilinging EMACS.

	3) There were warnings that "BIG_ENDIAN" was already defined, but I 
figured that was o.k.

	4) The compiler noted that the construct #if defined..., in, for
example: line 463 of LISP.H was not legal because "defined" was not a
currently defined macro, but I figured perhaps the default action was
acceptable. Now I doubt it.

	5) The compiler complaned that "AUXDOC.C" would not compile, but it
seems from the comments, at line 23, it shouldn't, so though I wish I had been
warned, I accept this.

	6) Finally, the compiler really bitched in trying to compile "BUFFER.C"
It seems that at line 1047 in this routine there is an assignment to something
like (int) (buffer_local_names.mode_name) and the compiler thinks that this
is an illegal assignment, and so forth for many further lines of a similar 
form.

	At this point I was convinced that something was wrong with trying to
continue to build a VMS version of GNU EMACS. What did I do that was wrong, and
what do I do to get further???