Re: Some comments about the current release

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 09:47:05AM +0200, Kern Sibbald wrote:
>In loading the current Cygwin software (dll 1.3.1 and others), in
>addition to the cygwin1.dll performance degradation, while loading the
>latest version of all the other files, I ran into the following
>problems:
>
>1.  libm.a is missing.

No, it isn't.  It's a symbolic link to libcygwin.a.

>2.  gzip.exe was missing in gzip-1.3-1.  This was especially painful as
>without it tar does not work.

It is not missing, and tar works fine without it.  It can't read a
gzipped archive, but it still works.

>4.  I was including <winsock2.h> in a bunch of header files in my .cpp
>programs which are strictly Windows (no Unix stuff) and I got lots of
>warning messages, which were annoying.  In my case, I solved the
>problem by removing the include of <winsock2.h> as it wasn't really
>needed, but it seems to me that there is a problem here that needs some
>attention.

How about actually reporting the warnings?  The theory, when reporting a
problem is that you provide details so that a theoretical person
interested in solving your problems does not have to attempt to perform
some tricky mind reading to figure out exactly what you're talking
about.  Since mind reading is such an imprecise exercise, it is possible
that the theoretical bug fixer might end up not even fixing your
problems despite their best intentions.  They might end up fixing the
problems of somebody in Duluth, MN, USA who had some other unrelated
winsock2.h issues.

Here's another clue for you: When you see obvious things like "libm.a
is missing" or "gzip.exe is missing", your first thought should not be
"Wow, the installation is screwed up! I'd better send email!"

We have this useful thing called a "mailing list archive".  You can use
it to see if other people have problems similar to yours.  This is very
important when you detect an obvious basic problem like "gzip.exe is
missing".  When you think about it, if this was true, then this mailing
list would have to be renamed to the "cygwin-gzip-is-missing" mailing
list because it would just be filled with reports of this egregious
lack.

I suspect that you did not actually use setup.exe to install your
packages.  It sounds like you might have used WinZip or something.  Why
do I think this?  Because the problems that you are reporting are all
with cygwin-specific things like symbolic links or "hard" links which
winzip knows nothing about.  setup.exe is not a cygwin program (for
obvious reasons) but it does know how to deal with these kind of
cygwin-isms.

Let me also clear up another potential source of confusion.  1.3.1 is
the version of the DLL.  The other packages in the Cygwin distribution
are updated asynchronously from the DLL upgrade.  So, if the last time
you tried to update your installation was after the 1.1.5 era, you've
got a LOT of new stuff on your system, none of which is related to
1.3.1.

cgf

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