Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 09:04:19 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Mumit Khan cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: fall of rsxntdj?? In-Reply-To: <7ppbkj$dmu$1@news.doit.wisc.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On 22 Aug 1999, Mumit Khan wrote: > There is a limited set available -- gdb, make, bison, sed, diffutils -- > but mostly scattered around. Are these ports available from the URLs you mentioned in your message? If not, where are they available? > I won't do it since there are already good > existing ports such as Cygwin etc, and I have no problems with 10-20% > slowdown in running dev tools. My problem with Cygwin ports is not the slow-down, it's the subtle bugs and misfeatures. I cannot recommend a set of tools to a user of Windows if those tools don't support backslashes and drive letters in file names (try "ls a:\*.c" some day). IMHO, the problem with the Cygwin ports is that they decided to solve all incompatibilities between Unix and Windows in the libraries, and leave the application code intact. This simply doesn't work. Even worse, it *almost* works, leaving the 10% of rare cases where all kinds of subtle issues bite the uninitiated. > Now, a question for those who want to develop under DOS and want to target > windows32: Why not build a mingw cross-compiler under DJGPP? That way, you > get the whole DJGPP dev environment and dev tools, and get to code for > win32 at your heart's content. This is probably a good idea, but it would waste some of the effort, because DJGPP tools don't work well on NT (mainly due to bugs in the NT DOS emulation and DPMI services, and to lack of support for long file names for DOS programs). So the resulting development setup will only be a good option for Windows 9X. OTOH, there should be no special problems to add development tools to Mingw by reusing the fruits of the several years of efforts in porting GNU tools to DJGPP. The first approximation should be simply to go through the ported sources and add #ifdef _WIN32 where there's already #ifdef __DJGPP__ or #ifdef __MSDOS__. The second approximation would be to enable some of the code disabled for DOS which native Windows application can use, like fork/exec, pipes, etc. I also expect that some of the effort should go into writing a good Posix-compliant library, because otherwise some of the DJPP-ported code won't work well. Here, again, reusing the DJGPP library sources (which are free software) should provide a useful starting point. I would suggest that people who want to use Mingw for serious development invest some effort along the above lines. I would expect this to be not very hard, after so many subtle problems have been identified and successfully solved by DJGPP. Most of these problems are common to DOS and Windows environments.