Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 11:08:19 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Mumit Khan cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: fall of rsxntdj?? In-Reply-To: <7qiatm$dm8$1@news.doit.wisc.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On 1 Sep 1999, Mumit Khan wrote: > The big problem is that some of the essential utilities required for > a GNU-style development environment will be very hard to port to a > minimal (no pun intended) environmnet like Mingw (which stands for > Minimalist Gnu-Win32), and bash is the prime example. It might be the case, but it might well be otherwise. Not having done this myself, I don't have any clear-cut evidence to back up my views. However, it strikes me that what DJGPP port of Bash accomplishes with a 630KB C library as its only help, shouldn't be too hard to do in Mingw. Perhaps some cozy features, like real job control and async subprocesses, will be missing; but then we *are* talking about a _minimal_ environmnet, and the lack of these features didn't prevent me from building even a single GNU package until now. If there are other essential utilities that have special problems as far as porting to Mingw is concerned, please tell what they are, and what features make them hard to port. Perhaps I'm missing some crucial aspects of this issue. > If DJGPP folks want to use it, the path I suggest is to use the rest > of DJGPP's very established tools with Mingw compiler/binutils. I > don't know anything about how DJGPP works, but if it does how it > expect it to (from all I've heard about it), the only challenge > would be to fix the pathnames to use 8.3, which may or may not > be trivial. I'm not sure what 8.3 pathname problems are you referring to; please elaborate. Long file names are only a problem on NT. I'd rather think that the first problem you'd bump into if you mix Mingw and DJGPP is the long command lines. You have no hope of being able to build any GNU package without overcoming that 126-character limit on command line. DJGPP programs have a special way of passing long (up to 16KB, customizable to 64KB) command lines between them; Win32 programs have another way. To solve this problem, either DJGPP startup code should be changed to support the Windows way, or Mingw should be changed to support the DJGPP way. > I don't know anything about how DJGPP works Some info that will give you an idea is at this URL: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/eli-m17n99.html