Questions about converting apps to cygwin

["Chris" <caj at cs dot york dot ac dot uk>]

Hello!

For experience (and because I want to use it) I am in the process of
converting the "bsdiff" binary diffing application to windows from *BSD, and
thought I would come via cygwin, and then decide if I should move to fully
windows.

A couple of questions about converting apps..

1) Cygwin seems to lack err.h (the "standard" err.h, not the one in openssl)
which I've seen in quite a lot of applications. It is fairly easy to stub
around but still annoying it's not there. Is there some reason this isn't in
the stdlib? could it be copied there from another GPL/BSDed standary C
library? Could I even write one? :)

2) If I set up a pipe between two applications, there seems to be limit to
how much I can send through it in one go, I'm not sure what the limit is but
under linux / bsd I regularily send through 13MB arrays in one go. However I
can send through 13MB without reading if I just knock it through in 10K
sections. Is there a fixed upper limit? Any chance of it being upped higher?

3) Disconnected from this.. cygwin doesn't seem to have ?spell (aspell,
ispell). I've compiled both aspell and ispell and they require very little
alteration.. is it simply a case of no-one wants to look after them? or a
lack of languages / nice setup program?

4) Finally, a notational issue :) In my application I use bzipped files. The
program currently forks, runs bzip externally, and then reads / writes to
it. The other alternative is to use the bzip library. Is there one of these
which is more "cygwinny"? :)

Thank you for any help and advice!

Chris


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