Subject: Some info on GNU-Win32 future directions
From: [email-masked] (Geoffrey Noer)

2 Jun 1997 15:14:55 -0700
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
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In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]> from "Michael Condict" at Jun 1, 97 10:26:47 pm
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Michael Condict wrote:
[...]
> 	- UWIN and Cygnus GnuWin32 seem to be more concerned with being able
> 	  to compile and execute UNIX source code under Windows without
> 	  changing it.  As such, they have much stricter need to emulate
> 	  the UNIX API faithfully, and need to avoid complete integration
> 	  with Windows.
[...]

I have a couple of comments pertaining to the future direction of the
Cygnus GNU-Win32 project and the Cygwin32 library.

First, I consider interoperability with the Windows platform to be
important.  There are still some mostly minor bugs in the drive letter
and UNC path-handling code; they should continue to get cleaned up over
time (at least that's the hope).  It is true that bash doesn't handle
drive letters in the same way that MKS does.  I'd be happy if that
changed as long as bash retains full POSIX path capabilities.  (As
I mentioned earlier, Cygwin32 bash could still use some improvement).

Second, at some point in the not too distant future, I'm considering
changing the way the compiler is set up in GNU-Win32 so that:

* By default, you'd get a vanilla Win32 compiler that links against
Microsoft libc/libm dlls distributed with the OSes.  It would produce
executables that do not depend on the Cygwin32 layer.  This is
somewhat similar to what Colin Peters' Minimalist GNU-Win32 package
gives you today.

* Through some easy mechanism like a flag to gcc or an environment
variable, you'd get access to the Cygwin32 cygwin.dll and get what
you have now.

The details aren't figured out yet but that's the idea.

-- 
Geoffrey Noer
[email-masked]
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