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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:37:09 -0700
From: "Dan Kegel" <dank AT kegel DOT com>
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Subject: Re: FAQ suggestion
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OK, third draft:

Q. I want to bundle Cygwin with a product, and ship it to customer
sites.  How can I do this without conflicting with any Cygwin
installed by the user?

A.  Third party developers who wish to use Cygwin should check if
there is a version of cygwin installed and use the installed
version if it is newer, or conditionally upgrade if it is not.
(This is same scheme used by Microsoft with great success
for its runtime DLLs for many years. If someone wrote a nice
utility for doing this type of checking, the Cygwin developers
would be happy to put it somewhere on the Cygwin site.)

Also, remember that by distributing your project which depends on cygwin,
you are bound by the license agreement, http://cygwin.com/licensing.html.
Your application must either be under the GPL, or you must purchase a
support contract through Red Hat; and if you choose to distribute
cygwin1.dll, you must also ensure that you provide the cygwin source code
that matches what you distribute.

Q.  Can I install a private version of cygwin that doesn't conflict
with the system cygwin (in the same way that multiple versions
of Wine can coexist)?
A. The Cygwin maintainers will resist any suggestion to support
this, no matter how sensible it might sound to you.

Q. But doesn't that mean that if some application installs
an older Cygwin library, my application will break?
A. Yes.  Tough.  Don't install applications like that.

Q. Doesn't this mean that Cygwin is fragile?
A. No.  Cygwin is *right*.  It's those other applications, or perhaps
the users, or both, that are wrong.

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