Re: where to find archives?

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Mohankumar Periasami wrote:

> Could you plz let me know where can I find the cygwin tar package
> archives (say 1.15.x)?

The only versions that are officially supported are the current and
previous version.  But if you look on the mirrors there are often older
versions as well.  I just took a look at sourceware.org and it has
versions of the main cygwin package going back to 1.5.15, so all mirrors
should have at least those.  If you want something further back than
that you'll have to just keep searching mirrors until you find one that
does not cull previous versions.  You can also google for the specific
filename of the package, and there is the Cygwin Time Machine site
(google it) which has older versions available, and you could build any
version you want from source by getting the appropriately dated files
from CVS.

But do realize that using ancient versions is not supported here on this
list so please don't ask for help if something breaks.  And it will,
unless you're quite careful, since the Cygwin DLL is backwards
compatible but NOT forwards compatible -- if you try to use an ancient
version of cygwin1.dll with binaries (i.e. .exe files such as ls.exe)
that were built and linked against a recent Cygwin version, they will
fail.  So you have to make sure that everything is from the same vintage
-- you can't just drop an ancient cygwin1.dll onto a system with current
packages.

However, the reverse is not true: you *can* use the current cygwin1.dll
with any .exe linked against any v1.x Cygwin DLL in existance, which
means that it is always safe to drop in a newer cygwin1.dll to replace
an older version, but never the reverse.

Brian

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