PPWIZARD Manual
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Operating System Status

See ZdNet's review for PPWIZARD (windows, unix, OS/2 and DOS)

This program runs natively under OS/2 or under the free Regina interpreter (available at "http://www.lightlink.com/hessling"). You may wish to have a look at a list of some of the operating system ppwizard users use.

Note that I only expect ppwizard program to work correctly on the native OS/2 or Regina rexx interpreters.

Note that regina looks in the directories mentioned in the "REGINA_MACROS" environment variable for rexx scripts if they are not in the current directory (it does not use the "PATH" environment variable). Unless "ppwizard.rex" is located in a path mentioned in "REGINA_MACROS" then a command such as "regina ppwizard tryme.it" will fail unless ppwizard is in the current directory. Of course it will also fail if "regina" is not in one of the directories mentioned in the "PATH" environment or in the current directory.

Your Source

I have made the preprocessor cross platform. This does not mean that your source will correctly build the output on another platform. There are issues that you will need to take care of to ensure that your code is cross platform also (if you care)!

As an example of a mistake you could easily have made, you could have used the OS/2 "filespec()" routine instead of the PPWIZARD "_filespec" call.

Status Under OS/2

Works like a champ!

Regina - All Operating Systems

Some things that are currently disabled are:

Some other situations not fully supported yet:

Status Under Windows NT/2000

No known issues. I now do all development and testing under Windows 2000.

Example command command when "W32SETUP" has been used to install ppwizard is:

    PPWIZARD  tryme.it
    

Status Under Windows ME

No known issues. It has been tested. Works as per Windows 98.

Status Under Windows 98

People are happily using it under Windows 98. Works as per Windows 95.

I believe the Windows 98 has the same 5 or 6 year old bug with its command processor as Windows 95.

Status Under Windows 95

PPWIZARD under Windows 95 works exactly like the DOS version.

It appears that a bug in Windows 95 (thanks Microsoft!) might prevent you getting the return code and so automatically determining if everything worked or not. Obviously games don't require return codes!

As for all non-NT based windows releases you will have to preceed the ppwizard command with "regina". Example command command is:

    REGINA PPWIZARD  tryme.it
    

Status Under Windows 3.1

Use DOS version of regina.

Status Under DOS

My own web site is reasonably complex and the DOS (DPMI) version has successfully compiled it.

Had to increase DMPI memory to do my whole site in one hit (*.IT), if you have a similar problem just call PPWIZARD many times (maybe processing "A*.IT B*.IT ... K*.IT" in one go and the rest the next. You get the idea! An even simpler method would be to use dependancies (/DependsOn), this way if you run out of memory, you simply restart the build and it will pick up from where it left off.

Status Under Unix

All command line switches should be specified using '-' and not '/'. I believe that ppwizard will run under all unix operating systems (although some may need some tweeking such as with SunOS).

I either test under or have reason to believe that ppwizard works under:

  1. Linux
    Known to work on 5.1 and 5.2 versions of Red Hat Linux.
  2. FreeBSD
  3. SunOS
    Tested on SunOS 5.8 (64 bit enabled) using GNU "find" version 4.1 (64 bit) in place of Sun's regular "find". If you do not wish to change the "find" command (which appears to be very non-standard) you could use a /Hook of "GetFileList".

You will need to obtain the Regina source code and compile it (there are now binaries in redhat package manager format). All testing used the generated "rexx" program. The source can be obtained from my http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/regina.htm.

Note that temporary files are put into the directory identified by the "TMP" environment variable, you must have write access to this. If the environment variable does not exist then files are placed into the "/tmp" directory.

If you have any problems (such as ppwizard not locating the input file) then you may need to use the /RedirMethod switch.

You may need to use is /Hook (for "GetFileList"), if you need to use this to get ppwizard going then let me know (I need "-debug" output) and I'll fix it.

As with all operating systems I am keen to fix any problems, unix is a bigger unknown to me with all it's different shells etc.

If you have a problem, please use the "-debug" command line switch and redirect the commands output, along with the name of the shell you are using and any other relevant details (all zipped please). I will typically have a fix for you in a few days and maybe a workaround even faster.

Status Under BeOS

Looks like Unix to ppwizard. No known issues.

Other Operating Systems

If regina works on your operating system but your operating system is not listed above then contact me.

If you are prepared to help (test changes etc) then I will try to get it to work for you. Before contacting me please download the latest "rexx4ppw" package from http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/ppwizard.htm and send me the redirected output.

Problems

When reporting problems please run the preprocessor with the "/debug" flag and give the the command line used, the redirected output and the source file(s).


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PPWIZARD Manual
My whole website and this manual itself was developed using PPWIZARD (free preprocessor written by Dennis Bareis)
Tuesday January 02 2001 at 7:37am