Mail Archives: cygwin/2010/01/10/12:37:08
On 2010/01/09 2:09 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jan 8 17:28, Steven Monai wrote:
>> Not to beat a dead hippo here, but if Cygwin allows in-use files to be
>> replaced, then what is 'setup.exe' needed for? (Aside from the initial
>> bootstrap of Cygwin, of course.) Shouldn't it be possible to have proper
>> package management---like dpkg, apt, rpm, yum, etc---from within Cygwin now?
>
> The most pressing problem is the replacement of the cygwin DLL itself.
> It's like installing a new kernel in Linux. However, in Linux you have
> to reboot to use the new kernel, while Cygwin is just a DLL. After the
> rename and replace operation, existing processes will use the old DLL
> while new processes will use the new DLL. This is bound to break and
> there's no clean way to do it, except to replace the Cygwin DLL while no
> other Cygwin process is running.
Could a Cygwin-specific package manager treat the cygwin DLL as a
special case? Instead of immediately replacing the cygwin DLL file (as
it would normally do for any other DLL), the package manager could use
the Windows "schedule-a-delete/rename-on-reboot" facility to arrange for
the DLL's replacement at the next reboot. Thus there would never be more
than one version of the cygwin DLL loaded at any given time.
-SM
--
--
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
- Raw text -