Subject: Re: The mail list in a news group
From: [email-masked] (Jim Balter)

21 Jan 1997 21:11:59 -0800
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Original-To: Carl J R Johansson <[email-masked]>
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Carl J R Johansson wrote:
> But for those who say 'the stated
> objective' would be to provide a Unix environment I suggest rereading
> the Web page, it says that it's a Win32 compiler even before it being
> a Unix environment.

You must be reading a different web page than I am.  The one at
http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-32 opens with

"The GNU-WIN32 Project Page

The GNU-Win32 tools are ports of the popular GNU development tools to
Windows NT/95 for the x86 and powerpc processors."

For those familar with it, "GNU development tools" does not mean "a
compiler".  It includes the entire c library, at a minimum.  The page
goes on:

"With these tools installed, it is now possible to: 

    write Win32 console or GUI applications that make use of the
    standard Microsoft Win32 API and/or the Cygwin32 API.

    easily configure and build many GNU tools from source (including
    rebuilding the gnu-win32 development tools themselves under x86 NT).

    port many other significant UNIX programs to Windows NT/95 without
    making significant changes to the source code.

    have a fairly full UNIX-like environment to work in, with access to
    many of the common Unix utilities (from both the bash shell and
    command.com).
"

By eliminating cygwin.dll, not even the second bullet (rebuilding the
tools themselves) can be achieved, not to mention the other items, which
are *fundamental* to what GNU-WIN32 has become.  Note this critical bit
from the "brief history" that follows the above:

"The next task was to port the tools to Win NT/95. We could have done
this by rewriting large portions of the source to work within the
context of the Win32 API. But this would have meant spending a huge
amount of time on each and every tool. Instead, we took a substantially
different approach by writing a shared library (cygwin.dll) that adds
the necessary UNIX-like functionality missing from the Win32 API (fork,
spawn, signals, select, sockets, etc.). (We call this new interface the
Cygwin32 API). Once written, it was possible to build working Win32
tools using UNIX-hosted cross-compilers, linking against this library."

Frankly, those saying that emulating unix is a bad idea just don't know
what they are talking about.  Without the unix emulation, there *are no*
tools.  mingw32 cannot stand alone.

> And for those who say 'why not use VC++' I could as well ask 'why not
> use NutCracker/OpenNT/[put your commercial environment here]'
> (personally I simply dislike it)."

I don't quite understand this.  So the reason not to use VC++ instead of
asking that the unix emulation fundamental to cygwin be dropped is
because "I simply dislike it"?

None of the people asking to do this or that to cygwin has offered to
pony up any money or time (except for one fellow who offered his help to
Colin Peters).  Given that, I think the response "then use VC++" is
quite a reasonable one.

This is, of course, separate from questions about static vs. dynamic
libraries and breaking up dll's, which are legitimate technical
questions.  But this whole idea that "emulating unix poisons the
project" is, well, dumb.

--
<J Q B>
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