Subject: Re: Registry freedom
From: Christopher Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2002 11:27:34 -0500

On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 10:16:42PM -0800, Doru Carastan wrote:
>Hello everybody,
>
>I believe it is time to break free from using the registry. It doesn't
>allow for multiple versions to coexists, which creates a nightmare when
>it comes to packaging Cygwin with another product. 

Hmm.  Packaging Cygwin with another product?  Sounds like you need to
talk to our sales department.

[Insert obligatory warning about GPL here]

>I've been rebuilding cygwin1.dll for a while with a custom shared memory
>id and registry section and I know that it is possible to have a given
>cygwin1.dll version coexist with its modified clone. Why not using
>GetModuleFileName() to retrieve the path to the dll and look around it
>for an mtab like ASCII file. Once the DLL path is retrieved the mtab
>file can be searched in $dllDir/../etc/:$dllDir. If it is missing then
>assume that there are no custom settings and use the defaults.
>
>I wonder if this can be done. Does anyone see any technical problems?

Of course its *technically* doable.

The biggest problem is technical support.  Now that you've set things
up so that you can have 27 different versions of cygwin on your system,
you'll have compounded our technical support alarmingly. I'm not going
to do this.  This isn't that big a problem for the normal release of
cygwin.

I can see why Wind River might have a problem since apparently you're
basing your Windows offering Red Hat's technology.  You probably don't
want to have to install your software into an existing commerical
directory that has the name "redhat" or "cygnus" in it.  However,
accomodating that really isn't a goal that I am very interested in.

If you want to make your own version of cygwin available and package it
with your now-GPLed product then, as you know, you have the power.  Just
make sure that no technical support shows up in [email-masked].

Regardless, I really don't see the problem.  You don't need to install
multiple versions of linux on your system to accommodate different
programs.  It is a little trickier on Windows but it is still not that
hard to do with the right installation software.

Of course, this is the same observation that I make whenever someone has
this interesting new idea.

cgf

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