Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 13:41:53 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: "Fernandes, Hilton" <hgfernan AT usp DOT br>
cc: DJGPP mailing list <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: Q: RCS on 95 w/ long file name
In-Reply-To: <9802141631.AA74976@spider.uspnet.usp.br>
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On Sat, 14 Feb 1998 Fernandes AT usp DOT br wrote:

> One idea is to create a port of RCS to Windows NT using Cygnus GNU-Win32
> (http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32/), that attempts to create a Un*x
> compatibility layer on top of Win32 operating systems, particularly Windows
> NT.

There's a caveat involved in the Cygnus ports: they have some
unresolved problems related to basic MS-Windows incompatibilities with
Unix.  The known problems are all described in the Cygnus FAQ
(available together with their distribution), but it doesn't really
help you when you bump into one of these problems.

IMHO, the original sin is that Cygnus decided to solve the
compatibility problems in a library (it's actually a DLL, but that's
not important for the purpose of this discussion).  This of course
makes the porting job much easier (typically, Cygnus ports don't do
any changes to the GNU sources).  However, anybody who has ever made a
port of a Unix package to MS platforms knows that some
incompatibilities cannot be resolved without knowing the context of
the problem, and a library doesn't know anything about the context.

As an example, consider the text/binary mode hassles.  While going to
binary mode as default will in most cases be an appropriate solution,
sometimes it will break programs which rely on lines being ended with
a single character `\n'.  It is therefore no surprise that the Cygnus
FAQ mentions this kind of problems.