From: noer AT cygnus DOT com (Geoffrey Noer) Subject: Announcing Cygwin B20! 1 Nov 1998 03:43:06 -0800 Message-ID: <19981031145252.24215.cygnus.gnu-win32@cygnus.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Greetings! I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Cygwin Beta 20 release for Windows NT, 95, and 98! Appended to this message is the README for this release. *Please* use the mirror closest to you to download the release. It may take a day or two for them to be updated. If you cannot wait until then, it is available from the primary ftp server in ftp://go.cygnus.com/pub/sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/latest as well as from the secondary ftp server sourceware.cygnus.com. Please read the README, especially the section describing the differences between this release and the last one! If you don't, you won't know to rename the CYGWIN32 environment variable to CYGWIN, among other things. Note that the Cygwin project WWW site has moved to: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/ Look there for additional information about the Cygwin! I would like to take a couple of paragraphs to thank the many other people who made this release possible: At Cygnus, the other members of the Win32 engineering team: Christopher Faylor, DJ Delorie, and our manager Eric Bachalo. Also, Tobin Brockett, who whipped out the InstallShield installers for us. Finally, Cygnus management for its commitment to free software. On the Net, Mumit Khan provided a lot of valuable patches to dlltool, Cygwin, and the Mingw header files for the B20 release. He also wrote the new dllwrap program. Sergey Okhapkin, Andy Piper, Ernie Boyd, and Corinna Vinschen all gave us valuable feedback prior to this release. Special thanks go to Sergey in particular -- as of this release, he has submitted close to a hundred fixes/improvements to the Cygwin library! Thanks to our many other contributors for their patches, and to everyone on the project mailing lists for their valuable feedback/suggestions! Enjoy! Geoffrey Noer noer AT cygnus DOT com ------------------------------- README.TXT -------------------------- README 20.0 for Cygwin B20 Release Cygwin Resources on the Internet ******************************** FTP Sites ========= The primary ftp site is `ftp://go.cygnus.com/pub/sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/'. There are also several mirrors: * North America: * Alberta: `ftp://ftp.reversion.ca/pub/mirrors/gnu-win32/' * Arizona: `ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/gnu-win32/' * California: `ftp://go.cygnus.com/pub/ftp.cygnus.com/gnu-win32/' * California: `ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/' * California (secondary): `ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/cygwin/' * Kansas: `ftp://ftp.the-b.org/pub/gnu-win32/' * Tennessee: `ftp://sunsite.utk.edu/pub/gnu-win32/' * Central America: * Costa Rica: `ftp://sunsite.ulatina.ac.cr/gnu-win32/' * South America: * Brazil: `ftp://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/gnu/=EXTRA=/cygnus/win32/' * Africa: * South Africa: `ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/sites/ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/' * Asia: * Japan: `ftp://ftp.crl.go.jp/pub/GNU/cygnus/gnu-win32/' * Japan: `ftp://sysg.kek.jp/cygnus/' * Japan: `ftp://ftp.u-aizu.ac.jp/pub/gnu/gnu-win32/' * Korea: `ftp://cair-archive.kaist.ac.kr/pub/gnu/gnu-win32/' * Australasia: * Australia: `ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/gnu-win32/' * Europe: * Austria: `ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/gnu/gnu-win32/' * Czech Republic: `ftp://sunsite.ms.mff.cuni.cz/MIRRORS/ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/' * Denmark: `ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/gnu-win32/' * France: `ftp://ftp.fwntug.org/gnu/' * France: `ftp://ftp.inria.fr/INRIA/Projects/Meta2/Scilab/Windows/cygwin/' * Germany: `ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/win32/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin32/mirrors/cygnus/' * Greece: `ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/pc/gnu-win32/' * Hungary: `ftp://ftp.szrmkk.hu/pub/gnu-win32/ftp.cygnus.com/' * Italy: `ftp://aaue.matrice.it/pub/gnu-win32/' * Poland: `ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/cygnus/gnu-win32/' * Slovenia: `ftp://sunsite.fri.uni-lj.si/pub/gnu-win32/' * Spain: `ftp://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/gnu-win32/' * Sweden: `ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/gnu/gnu-win32/' * Switzerland: `ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/gnu-win32/' * UK: `ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/gnu/cygnus/gnu-win32/' * UK: `ftp://ftp.ccp14.dl.ac.uk/ccp14/ftp-mirror/programming/cygnus-gnu-win32/pub/gnu-win32/' * Ukraine: `ftp://ftp.ics-co.kiev.ua/pub/mirror/ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/' The Cygwin Project WWW Site =========================== The main WWW page for the Cygwin project is `http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/'. A page containing tool-specific information is `http://www.cygnus.com/pubs/gnupro/'. Links to additional documentation are accessible from the main web page. Installation Instructions ************************* Contents ======== The following packages are included in the full release: Development tools: binutils, bison, byacc, dejagnu, diff, expect, flex, gas, gcc, gdb, itcl, ld, libstdc++, make, patch, tcl, tix, tk User tools: ash, bash, bzip2, diff, fileutils, findutils, gawk, grep, gzip, m4, sed, shellutils, tar, textutils, time The user tools release only contains the user tools. Full source code is available for these tools. It is split into these two units. Installing the binary release: ============================== Important! Be sure to remove any older versions of the Cygwin tools from your PATH environment variable so you do not execute them by mistake. Connect to one of the ftp servers listed above and cd to the directory containing the latest release. On our primary server, that would be: `ftp://go.cygnus.com/pub/sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/latest/'. If you want the development tools and the programs necessary to run the GNU configure mechanism, you should download the full binary release called `full.exe'. If you only care about the user tools listed above, download `user.exe' instead. If you have an unreliable connection, download the appropriate binary in smaller chunks instead. For the split cdk installer, get the files in the `full-split' subdirectory. Once downloaded, combine the split files at the command prompt by doing a: copy /b xaa + xab + xac + ... + xai + xaj full.exe del xa*.* A similar process can be used for the user tools. Once you have an install executable on your system, run it. First off, the installer will prompt you for a location to extract the temporary files it needs to install the release on your system. The default should be fine for most people. Next it will ask you to choose an install location. The default is `:\cygnus\cygwin-b20'. Feel free to choose another location if you would prefer. Finally, it will ask you for the name of the Program Files folder shortcut to add. By default, the installer will create a `Cygwin B20' entry in a folder called `Cygnus Solutions'. When this step is completed, it will install the tools and exit. At this point, you should be able to look under the start menu and select "Cygwin B20". This will pop up a bash shell with all special environment variables set up for you. If you are running Windows 95 or 98 and are faced with the error message "Out of environment space", you need to increase the amount of environment space in your config.sys and try again. Adding the line `shell=C:\command.com /e:4096 /p' should do the trick if `C:' is your system drive letter. There are two remaining thing you should do from this prompt. First, you need to type `mkdir -p /tmp' to ensure that a directory for temporary files exists for programs that expect to find one there. Second, if you are installing the full distribution (`full.exe'), various programs will need to be able to find `/bin/sh'. You should `mkdir -p /bin' and put a copy of `sh.exe' there, removing the older version, if present. You can use the `mount' utility to select which drive letter is mounted as `/'. See the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file for more information on `mount'. If you should ever want to uninstall the tools, you may do so via the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel. Installing the source code ========================== Before downloading the source code corresponding to the release, you should install the latest release of the tools (either the full release or just the user tools). Create the directory that will house the source code. `cd' there. Connect to one of the ftp servers listed above and cd to the directory containing the latest release. On our primary server, that would be: `ftp://go.cygnus.com/pub/sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/latest/'. If you want the user tools source code, `cd' into the `user-src-split' subdirectory. Download the files there. If you want the development tools sources, `cd' into the `dev-src-split' subdirectory. Download the files there. Back in the Windows command shell, for the user tools source: copy /b xba + xbb + xbc + xbd + xbe + xbf + xbg user-src.tar.bz2 del xb*.* bunzip2 user-src.tar.bz2 tar xvf user-src.tar For the development tools source: copy /b xca + xcb + xcc + xcd + ... + xck + xcl dev-src.tar.bz2 del xc*.* bunzip2 dev-src.tar.bz2 tar xvf dev-src.tar Both expand into a directory called `src'. And you should be done... Release Beta 20 (Oct 30 1998) ***************************** This is a significant update to the Beta 19 release. In addition to an EGCS-based compiler and updated tools, this release includes a new version of the Cygwin library that contains many improvements and bugfixes over the last one. The project has a new name! --------------------------- Starting with this release, we are retiring the "GNU-Win32" name for the releases. We have also dropped the "32" from Cygwin32. This means that you should now refer to the tools as "the Cygwin toolset", the library as "the Cygwin library" or "the Cygwin DLL", and the library's interface as "the Cygwin API". Because of this name change, we have changed any aspects of the library that involved the name "Cygwin32". For example, the CYGWIN32 environment variable is now the CYGWIN environment variable. API functions starting with cygwin32_ are still available under that form for backwards-compatibility as well as under the new cygwin_-prefixed names. The same goes for the change of preprocessor define from __CYGWIN32__ to __CYGWIN__. We will remove the old names in a future release so please take the minute or two that it will take to remove those "32"s. Thanks and I apologize for the hassle this may cause people. We would have changed the name to "Bob" but that name's already taken by Microsoft... :-) Why change it? For one thing, not all of the software included in the distributions is GNU software, including the Cygwin library itself. So calling the project "GNU-Win32" has always been a bit of a misnomer. In addition, we think that calling the tools the "Cygwin tools" that use the "Cygwin library" will be less confusing to people. Also notice that we are now on the spiffy new sourceware.cygnus.com web/ftp site. The old address will work for some unknown period of time (hopefully at least until we get all of the mirrors adjusted). Changes in specific tools: -------------------------- The latest public EGCS release is now the basis for the compiler used in Cygwin distributions. As a result, EGCS 1.1 is the compiler in this release, with a few additional x86/Cygwin-related patches. Those of you who are more interested in native Windows development than in porting Unix programs will be glad to know that a new gcc flag "-mno-cygwin" will link in the latest Mingw32 libs and produce an executable that does not use Cygwin. All of the other development tools have been updated to their latest versions. The linker (ld) includes many important bug fixes. It is now possible to safely strip a DLL with a .reloc section. The windres resource compiler is significantly improved. Beta 20 also includes upgrades to a number of packages: ash-0.3.2-4, bash 2.02.1, grep-2.2, ncurses 4.2, and less 332. We have added bzip2 0.9.0 to the distribution. And you'll now find that the df utility has joined its other friends from the fileutils package. The sh executable is still ash from the Debian Linux distribution but no longer has the problematic quoting bug that was present in the Beta 19 release. Control-Cs in the bash shell no longer kill background tasks. Tcl/tk are upgraded to version 8.1a2 (with additional patches). Compatible versions of tix and itcl are included. These all include Cygwin-compatible configury files so you can do a Unix-style build of the Win32 ports of tcl/tk. expect has been upgraded to 5.26 with some additional Cygwin patches. In response to customer requests and feedback, Cygnus has developed a better graphical front end to GDB than GDBtk or WinGDB. This tcl-based GUI is shipping today to customers of the GNUPro Toolkit. The instrumentation changes to GDB and the tcl interpreter that was built into GDB are part of the GPL'd source base. But the tcl scripts are not being made available to the net at this time. For this reason, you will only find a command-line version of gdb in this Cygwin release. DJ Delorie has written a new "cygcheck" program that will print out useful information about how your Cygwin environment is set up, what DLLs a named executable is loading from where, etc. We hope this will make it easier to help diagnose common setup problems. The ps utility has been upgraded. It now has several options including shorter and longer output formats. Changes in the Cygwin API (cygwin.dll): --------------------------------------- This version of Cygwin is backwards-compatible with the beta 19 release. If you rename the cygwin1.dll included as part of B20 to "cygwinb19.dll", the old executables should be able to function with the new version of the library. Quite a lot of the Cygwin internals have been rewritten or modified to address various issues. If you have a question about specific changes, the winsup/ChangeLog file in the development tools sources lists all changes made to the DLL over the last three years. Following are a few highlights: We are now using a new versioning scheme for Cygwin. There is now a separate version number for the DLL, the API, the shared memory region interfaces, and the registry interface. This will hopefully make it easier for multiple Cygwin toolsets to coexist in one user environment. Windows 98 is now supported (it is like Windows 95 from Cygwin's perspective). We still recommend upgrading to Windows NT. While there is still a lot left to do in improving Cygwin's runtime performance, we have put some effort into this prior to the B20 release. Hopefully you will find that the latest version of Cygwin is faster than ever. In addition, we have plugged several nasty handle leaks associated with opening/closing files and with using ttys. The lseek call now uses WriteFile to fill gaps with zeros whenever a write is done past an EOF, rather than leaving "undefined" data as Win32 specifies. Significant work has been done to improve the Cygwin header files. The Cygwin Support for Unix-style serial I/O is much improved. Path handling has had another round of fixes/rewrites. We no longer use NT Extended Attributes for storing Unix permissions/execute status because the file NT creates on FAT partitions is not scalable to thousands of files (everything slows to a crawl). Signal handling has also gotten a fair amount of attention. Unfortunately, there are still some problems combining itimers and Windows 9x. The number of ttys has been upped from 16 to 128. New API calls included in the DLL: sethostent, endhostent. As mentioned earlier, all cygwin32_-prefixed functions are now exported with a cygwin_ prefix instead. Please adjust your code to call the newly named functions. Known/potential Problems in the B20 Release ******************************************* Configures in Windows 95/98 not completing ========================================== B20's configure setup does not yet work reliably under Windows 95/98 (it returns after configuring the top level directory of the compiler tools without recursing into subdirectories). We will release an update to address this problem as soon as we have a fix. Windows 95 freezing up ====================== While this problem may have been worse under B19, Control-c's in bash under Win 95 can lock up the Win 95 kernel, freezing your machine. This problem can be fixed if you are running the OSR2 version of Win 95 by installing the USB patch available on OSR2 CDs or on MSDN subscription CDs. More information about OSR2 and the USB patch is available from `http://www.compuclinic.com/osr2faq/index.html'. Some programs can't deal with // pathname scheme in arguments ============================================================= gcc and other tools aren't fully compatible with the current pathname scheme: it can't grok an argument of -I//d/foo which means it is vital that when attempting to configure/build UNIX packages, that only normal paths with single slashes are used. - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".