From: Eli Zaretskii Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: [ANN] Announcing PW32 - the DJGPP 'port' to Win32 Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 10:22:01 +0200 Organization: NetVision Israel Lines: 39 Message-ID: References: <38c41ffa DOT 4897862 AT is> NNTP-Posting-Host: is.elta.co.il Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: news.netvision.net.il 952417488 6512 199.203.121.2 (7 Mar 2000 08:24:48 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse AT netvision DOT net DOT il NNTP-Posting-Date: 7 Mar 2000 08:24:48 GMT X-Sender: eliz AT is In-Reply-To: To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: dj-admin AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Damian Yerrick wrote: > >PW32 is implementation of (subset of) POSIX/Unix API for Win32 systems. Its > >main concerns are efficiency and full platform coverage, including adequate > >support for low-end Win9x systems. PW32 is based on DJGPP's runtime library > >by DJ Delorie. PW32 is licensed under LGPL. > > > >* Tested and runs on 9x and NT. > >* Binaries provided: build environment based on gcc-2.95.2-1-mingw32 > > > >http://pw32.sourceforge.net/ > > Three words: Look out Cygwin. IMHO, the Cygwin way of ``fixing'' Windows has a couple of subtle, but significant drawbacks. One of them is that the //d/foo format of DOS-style absolute file names with drive letters is not supported by any Windows program that wasn't compiled with Cygwin. (Just the other day someone complained on gnu.emacs.bug that invoking Cygwin-compiled GDB from NTEmacs didn't work because of that.) The other subtle problem is with mounting drives as text or binary, which is supposed to ``fix'' the text/binary schizophrenia: what do you do if some of the files on a drive are text, but others are binary (as it usually happens to be)? All these (and other) tricks were meant to avoid changes to Unix sources, fixing things transparently in the library. IMHO, experience shows that this doesn't work very well, primarily because the library doesn't know enough about the application's context. I think the DJGPP way of achieving the same goal--do part of the fixing in the library, but leave the rest to the application--is better. So I think the above library for Windows is a very good idea, which should be seriously considered by people who want a native Windows development environment.