cygwin and ms-sfu

[Christopher Faylor]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2005 at 08:02:50PM -0700, James R. Phillips wrote:
>OK, here's something unrelated to biology in general and hippos in
>particular.  News reports have it that ms is integrating features of
>sfu into their next windows server release, leading me to suspect it
>may become an integral part of longhorn-professional too.  _And_ they
>hired the founder of Gentoo (reportedly) to set up a portage-like
>directory of ported unix software for use with sfu.
>
>This could really rock, esp if they make x.org one of the first ported
>apps.  Is cygwin in danger of being surpassed/obviated?

If so, c'est la vie.

>The cygwin architecture is based on win32, which is necessary to
>support win9x, but ms isn't worried about that.  ms-sfu is programmed
>without using the win32 subsystem, which just represents another layer
>to go through in the winnt architecture.  Should cygwin consider an
>architectural change, dropping win32 support, and programming directly
>to the native winnt api?

There is no architectural change needed.  Cygwin already uses the WINNT
API for a few crucial things and has for years.  But, it hardly seems
necessary to go to additional effort if Windows is going to allow easy
porting of UNIX programs.

I don't see any reason to struggle to keep cygwin alive if there is
something superior out there which is readily available.

cgf