GNU coreutils does not work on Cygwin because of freopen() ?

[Sjors Gielen]

Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
> Sjors Gielen wrote:
>> Did you try with Cygwin coreutils or GNU coreutils? :)
> 
> Cygwin's coreutils *is* GNU coreutils, with some patches which you will
> find necessary.
> 
[snip]
Dave Korn wrote:
 >   However, you may have to recreate all the cygwin-specific patches
 > that the
 > cygwin bash maintainer hasn't managed to send upstream yet...
[snip]
 > ?? Are you using an old version??  It should be fixed by now.
 >
 > http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-coreutils@gnu.org/msg10188.html

Oooh. Can I get a list of patches the Cygwin project has already applied 
to packages? :)
So this bug was fixed in Cygwin's version of GNU coreutils, but not in 
Debian's version of GNU coreutils. Has a patch for that been sent 
upstream? I took GNU coreutils from Debian sid, which should be almost 
as up to date as it gets...

 >   Dunno if your project makes sense.  You'll have to end up porting
 > everything where the differences in the underlying OS show through...
 > which is
 > basically what Cygwin package maintainers have already done for most
 > of this
 > stuff.  Do you mean you're trying to cross-compile Debian on Cygwin,
 > or do you
 > actually want to build the whole Debian distro under Cygwin to run on
 > Windows
 > rather than natively under a linux kernel?

I'm trying to create a full Cygwin port for Debian. This means the base 
system packages, et cetera. Let's just keep it at I love apt and dpkg 
for package managers.

 >   Nope.  Cygwin runs on windows, which uses CR-LF for line endings,
 > but
 > Cygwin is POSIX-compliant and uses LF internally.  This is exactly
 > what O_TEXT
 > was invented for: it translates LF->CRLF on write and CRLF->LF on
 > read.  On
 > Linux platforms, the native format is LF line-ends, so O_TEXT and
 > O_BINARY are
 > the same, but not here.

But if Cygwin uses LF internally, why does it translate to CRLF on 
write? I remember this installation option, asking if it should use CRLF 
or LF for writing files. I think I chose LF only, because that's the 
Unix way of doing it.

Do I misunderstand here? Currently, when I write a file in vim and save 
it, it has LF line endings anyway. If it is saved with LF line endings, 
there's no difference between O_TEXT and O_BINARY, right? So why not 
skip this at all and make *every* fd O_BINARY by default?

 >> 2. I don't know why coreutils is calling freopen() at all. Should I
 >> patch it out completely, or add something like an #ifndef __CYGWIN__
 >> around the pieces of code in question?
 >
 >   Well, if you really want to build coreutils under cygwin, why not
 > use
 > setup.exe to install the corresponding source package, which comes
 > with all
 > these problems pre-solved for you?

That would, of course, defeat the idea of bootstrapping Debian on Cygwin. ;)

Sjors


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