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Re: Documentation on -mno-cygwin Accuracy


On 2/7/2012 11:58 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 05:14:59PM -0600, Jesse Ziser wrote:
On 2/7/2012 4:14 PM, carolus wrote:
On 2/7/2012 3:12 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:

There's the usual misconception about the GPL. If you create an application which is linked against the Cygwin DLL (or any other GPLed library), but you only use the application in-house, there's no reason at all to distribute the source code to your collegues. If one of them really wants it, he can always ask you, right? Only if you provide the binaries to customers or to the world in some way, you are supposed to provide the sources codes as well in a GPL-compatible way.


In a publication I have offered to furnish on request the source code and windows executable for a program that I personally run under cygwin. Don't I have to use mingw for the publicly distributed version, or else bundle the executable with cygwin source code? As I understand, simply providing a link to the cygwin web site does not satisfy the license.

Well, if you don't want them to have to install Cygwin, then that's a bigger issue than just licensing. Think of Cygwin like an OS. If you want to create something that can run under Windows, not Cygwin, then you have to build it for Windows, not Cygwin. I don't know that it is even possible to simply "bundle" Cygwin with your application. Cygwin isn't just some little collection of libraries or something. It's a whole system that must be correctly installed on someone's computer.

Actually, you can easily bundle a program with the Cygwin DLL and have it work fine. You don't need to install the whole system. That doesn't mean it's a good idea, however, since your soon-to-be-out-of-date DLL could cause confusion with an existing Cygwin application.

If you really want Mingw (a free compiler and development environment
for Windows), maybe what you should do is just download and install
Mingw, and use that, instead of doing it through the Cygwin compiler
using a barely-supported option.  (Then you should get help with any
problems you have over at Mingw's website instead of here.)

The MinGW cross-compiles are not "barely supported". They are included in the distribution precisely so that people can build pure-windows programs under Cygwin.

Oh? Then I got the wrong impression from the documentation and the mailing list when I was trying to work all that out a few years ago. I can't find it now, but I could swear there was something about it being "deprecated" or "partially supported" or something.


--
+---------------------------+
| Jesse Ziser, Code Warrior |
| Applied Research Labs: UT |
+---------------------------+

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