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Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 12:37:42 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: Source for MinGW stuff in Cygwin
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"J.D McLaughlin" wrote:

> A while ago, while trying to find out how to write a getch function, I was
> told that the source for some part of Cygwin's MinGW stuff - either
> gcc-mingw-core/g++ or mingw-runtime - contained the source for one. After
> a while of searching the source for all three, I found:
> 
> 1.) There was no source for getch().

When you use mingw you are using Microsoft's C runtime library
(MSVCRT.DLL).  So, the source to getch() is proprietary and you won't
find it in any tarball distributed on a Cygwin or MinGW mirror site. 
The CRT source is available for inspection if you own the Visual Studio
product (it may even be in the PSDK) but you can't freely copy,
distribute, modify (etc) it so it's certainly not open source.

The mingw-runtime package just contains import libraries for linking
against MSVCRT.  It does not contain the source to MSVCRT.  (It also
contains the source to support libraries like mingwex, but this is only
for additional C99 support.)

Questions about Mingw are off-topic for this list and should be posted
to the mingw list.

> 2.) The folders (and compressed folders containing my attempts to fix the
> problem by installing later versions of the source) containing the source
> for gcc-mingw-core and gcc-mingw-g++ contained no source code at all,
> although they contained a few other items, such as header files and
> (surprisingly) executable files.
> 
> Is this because the wrong files have been distributed, or is there some
> fact I'm not aware of re: getting at the source files?

That indeed does look like packaging problem with the gcc-mingw
packages.  However, the source used to create the gcc-mingw modules is
exactly the source code available for download from the mingw site, so
you can just download it from there.  However, this will give you the
source to the compiler, NOT the C library.  You will find no getch()
there.

Brian

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