Mail Archives: cygwin-developers/2002/06/12/18:02:11
Conrad Scott wrote:
> I know all about the "I used it 'cos I could" feeling. It's a shame that the
> daemon isn't a pure win32 program, but I get the feeling that it will depend
> more on cygwin features as it develops, rather than fewer; for example,
> configuration or log files should obey cygwin naming rather than raw win32.
This reminded me of something....
Robert -- once upon a time the idea was bandied about to create a
"subcygwin" static library that used only native, non-cygwin calls to
directly access the cygwin mount table and sort of duplicate the
functionality of (only) these two functions from cygwin.dll:
cygwin_conv_to_full_win32_path
cygwin_conv_to_posix_path
[I'm sure this code is already in setup.exe's codebase -- somewhere].
The idea being so that non-cygwin programs -- like setup.exe and perhaps
the eventual rebase utility -- could understand cygwin paths, while
remaining "non-cygwin". [I'm license agnostic here; if we want
non-open-soure progs to interoperate with cygwin, then the above two
functions must be re-engineered by someone who hasn't seen cygwin's
code; that's a lot of work. Personally, I'm only worried about
open-source progs, so IMO the chinese firewall is unnecessary: use
cygwin-inspired code, put it in a GPL'ed static library -- this way Red
Hat's license is satisfied, and we get a *static* library that enables,
for instance:
setup.exe and rebase.exe to understand cygwin paths -- but without
relying on cygwin1.dll itself. This is a good and necessary thing for
these two specialized programs.
Ditto maybe strace.exe, cygcheck.exe (cygwin programs which do not
depend on cygwin1.dll)
Now, OTOH, cygserver *could* use this library for path access, but why?
cygserver, by its very nature, will depend on cygwin1.dll -- so why
not use it's path conversion routines. No need to rely on setup's
subcygwin.a. I don't see why using cygwin1.dll from cygserver is a bad
thing...
Anyway, I lost track of what happened with this proposal. Was it
decided that this was a bad idea, and that
setup
rebase
strace
cygcheck
should all continue to duplicate cygwin-like path translation
independently, or did the idea just fizzle for lack of volunteers?
--Chuck
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