Re: Updated: 1.7.0-34 (...and a plea)

[cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm]

Corinna Vinschen wrote on Fri, 5 Dec 2008 12:07:33 +0100
> On the not so bright side, I'm a bit disappointed that only few
> maintainers are actually rebuilding their applications for 1.7.  All
> applications will probably profit at least from the now long pathnames
> up to 32K.  And many network related applications will profit from IPv6
> support and the new getaddrinfo family of functions.

With which gcc? There was talk of using gcc4 as the "official" 1.7
compiler. Is that not on the table, or perhaps it was on the table but
no longer is, due to Dave's extended absence and the desire to not
FURTHER delay cygwin-1.7?

The reason I ask is because such a compiler switch would ALSO require
rebuilding many of the packages, yet again. (C++ definitely, C? maybe;
possible ABI change, as well as the shared libgcc thing). See this thread:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-10/msg00090.html
which I started two days before Dave Korn disappeared. (Err...his "a
week to a fortnight" has become "a month and counting" Has anybody heard
from Dave?)

I've been holding off waiting for word on that...and then for Dave to
return.

> With the http://cygwin.com/setup-1.7.exe tool you can easily install two
> different Cygwin trees on the same machine for quite some time now.
> They don't interact with each other neither in a good nor in a bad way.

Services still need special coordinating. These scripts can help:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-04/msg00327.html

> You can even run them in parallel in two different console windows
> without any bad interaction.  Isn't that a good reason to start porting
> to 1.7?

I've been burned by this twice (or three times, depending on how you count)

Setup-1.7 (build 2.606)
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-08/msg00128.html (update #2a)
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-08/msg00129.html (new install #2b
or #3)

and it's made me a little gunshy -- so I've been sticking with a VM
running XPsp3, with "myself" having Admin privs (that eliminates a lot
of the special strange newness (1.7+vista+non-admin+UAC), leaving mostly
only cygwin-1.7 newness to deal with). But, except for a few
network-related packages I rebuilt back in April, and the recent(?)
flurry of autotools packages, even there I've been holding off for the
last month+ due to the gcc4 question. (And, I still have an open issue
with gettext-0.17 which I haven't had time to track down yet. It's been
released, but I'm not convinced the new config.rpath and related m4
files work -- at all -- on cygwin. See
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2008-11/msg00226.html)


Concerning setup-1.7, and hassles concerning setup-1.7("new" install or
upgrade) + cygwin-1.7sidebyside + vista + UAC + non-adminstrative user,
MAYBE they've all been resolved now. I don't know.

I see on 20 Aug:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-08/msg00160.html
version 2.608 addressed some permissions/ownership issues, and stops
clobbering your cygwin-1.5 registry mount points, so that's good.

and later the same day, version 2.609 adds special handling for /var/log
and /var/run
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-08/msg00169.html

AFAICT, that is the current version of setup-1.7.  However, there was an
additional change in the source code on 29 Aug, dealing with the
dependency order resolution, that is not yet reflected in the released
binary.  This change was the result of a giant subthread here:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-08/msg00087.html

Maybe we should have a new 2.610 for those changes?

FYI, I never did get a definitive OK to proceed in this thread:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-07/msg00024.html

But, if I can get a definitive answer to the gcc4 question, I'll try to
more proactive updating my (binary) packages for 1.7.

--
Chuck