From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.1000307102138.21628G-100000@is>
References:	<38c41ffa DOT 4897862 AT is> <use8csc5shcorhkt0kaqb4cf6d1p7n89br AT 4ax DOT com>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	is.elta.co.il
Mime-Version:	1.0
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:	<use8csc5shcorhkt0kaqb4cf6d1p7n89br@4ax.com>
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

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.

- Raw text -