a2ps on Cygwin quietly exits with code 127 on Windows 7

[Rasputin Paskudniak]

On 7/27/2010 1:33 AM, Rasputin Paskudniak wrote:
> On 7/26/2010 11:53 PM, Dave Korn wrote:
>> On 23/07/2010 21:23, Beau Nanaz wrote:
>>> Greetings.
>>>
>>> I have a new Windows-7 machine and one of the first things I downloaded
>>> was Cygwin, making sure to include a2ps and ps2pdf.
>>>
>>> Unlike the flawless running (after diddling $HOME/.a2ps/a2psrc) I had
>>> under my previous XP box, This one is misbehaving: It does nothing
>>> visible, even for a2ps --version.
>>
>> Try installing libintl2. a2ps.exe depends on that very old version but
>> doesn't mention it explicitly in its setup.hint dependencies.
>> (Probably it
>> used to get pulled in by default anyway by some other package but now
>> the last
>> other thing that used to use v2 of libintl has been updated to a more
>> recent
>> one so there's nothing left to cause it to be installed any more.)
>>
>> cheers,
>> DaveK
>>
>>
>>
> YEOWW! That did it. My problem has been solved - I just ran it ant then
> ran that through ps2pdf. Beautiful!!
>
> Thank you! Now where is there an FAQ on a2ps so we can add that to the
> list. I can't be the only one banging my head against the wall on this
> issue. (And whatever nomm de guerre I am using, my first name is *not*
> Harvey. ;-)

A day after I posted the above, I had an awful insight into David's 
helpful suggestion:
 >> Try installing libintl2. a2ps.exe depends on that very old version
 >> but doesn't mention it explicitly in its setup.hint dependencies.

Are there other such undocumented dependencies lurking around the Cygwin 
build?  Obviously, this one got away.  Is there any way we could edit 
that setup.hint file to fix this for the nest poor slob who encounters 
this problem?

On the Cygwin side of the blame:  In every Unix/Linux I used, if a 
shared library cannot be found, we get a very clear message, something like:
... Missing library ....
In this case, all I got was the quiet death of the program.  The only 
way to get any kind of message was to try to run it under strace, which 
yielded an unhelpful message, described in the thread with the subject line:
 > strace on a2ps complains about \Device\Harddisk4\DR4

I'd like to again thank DaveK and Rene for the help on this problem.
-- 
+- Rasputin Paskudniak -----------------------------------+
|- In perpetual pursuit of undomesticated aquatic avians -|
+---------------------------------------------------------+


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