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Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/09/02/17:01:04

Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 11:08:19 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: Mumit Khan <khan AT xraylith DOT wisc DOT edu>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: fall of rsxntdj??
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On 1 Sep 1999, Mumit Khan wrote:

> The big problem is that some of the essential utilities required for
> a GNU-style development environment will be very hard to port to a
> minimal (no pun intended) environmnet like Mingw (which stands for
> Minimalist Gnu-Win32), and bash is the prime example.

It might be the case, but it might well be otherwise.  Not having done
this myself, I don't have any clear-cut evidence to back up my views.
However, it strikes me that what DJGPP port of Bash accomplishes with
a 630KB C library as its only help, shouldn't be too hard to do in Mingw.
Perhaps some cozy features, like real job control and async
subprocesses, will be missing; but then we *are* talking about a
_minimal_ environmnet, and the lack of these features didn't prevent
me from building even a single GNU package until now.

If there are other essential utilities that have special problems as
far as porting to Mingw is concerned, please tell what they are, and
what features make them hard to port.  Perhaps I'm missing some
crucial aspects of this issue.

> If DJGPP folks want to use it, the path I suggest is to use the rest
> of DJGPP's very established tools with Mingw compiler/binutils. I 
> don't know anything about how DJGPP works, but if it does how it
> expect it to (from all I've heard about it), the only challenge
> would be to fix the pathnames to use 8.3, which may or may not
> be trivial.

I'm not sure what 8.3 pathname problems are you referring to; please
elaborate.  Long file names are only a problem on NT.

I'd rather think that the first problem you'd bump into if you mix
Mingw and DJGPP is the long command lines.  You have no hope of being
able to build any GNU package without overcoming that 126-character
limit on command line.  DJGPP programs have a special way of passing
long (up to 16KB, customizable to 64KB) command lines between them;
Win32 programs have another way.  To solve this problem, either DJGPP
startup code should be changed to support the Windows way, or Mingw
should be changed to support the DJGPP way.

>  I don't know anything about how DJGPP works

Some info that will give you an idea is at this URL:

     http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/eli-m17n99.html

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