Cygwin on Max OS X ?

Chris J. Breisch chris.ml@breisch.org
Fri Jun 6 00:12:00 GMT 2014


Andrey Repin wrote:
> Greetings, Warren Young!
>
>>> make sure the tools you are using are
>>> available for Cygwin in the same (or compatible enough) form.
>
>> OS X is closest to the BSDs in terms of userland and kernel APIs,
>> whereas Cygwin mostly emulates Linux, except where Win32 leaks through.
>>    There are plenty of differences between them that can justify testing
>> under both environments:
>
>> - vast dynamic linkage, networking, and ACL/EA differences
>> - /Users, /System, /Library vs /home, /sbin, /lib
>> - BSD find, locate, etc. vs GNU findutils
>> - bsdtar vs GNU tar
>> - no /proc in OS X
>> - /dev/clipboard vs pbcopy/pbpaste
>> - strace vs dtrace
>> - /etc files, SAM and AD vs Open Directory
>> - launchd vs Windows Services
>
> I kind of know that. Had a Mac for short of a year myself, and used and
> exploited it thoroughly.
> I think, the real question could only be answered by the OP himself: What
> actually you are doing, what parts of the system your scripts are touching,
> etc.
> I know what I write (that has to be cross-platform) is easily portable,
> because it is pretty self-contained, not touching the system core in any way.
> At least, it works transparently on Mac/Linux/Win with no changes to the core
> functionality, even if sometimes need a bit of pre-configuration to adapt to
> the specific user's locations and such. But this would be true for many
> projects.
>

I had a crazy idea about this.

You could port cygport to OS X. That shouldn't be too hard.

Then grab the source packages using setup on a Windows box and scp them 
over to your Mac. Then remove any Cygwin specific patches, and build 
them using cygport (most of them do). Maybe change the configs to 
install in /usr/cygwin/bin or /opt/cygwin/bin or something like that. I 
think most things should compile without too much difficulty, and you'll 
have a fairly compatible Cygwin-like system on your Mac.

Yes, I know that some Cygwin-specific apps probably won't compile at all.

After all, it's not cygwin1.dll that you want to port, it's the Cygwin 
environment.

Probably a fantasy. Using the Macports stuff is almost certainly easier.


-- 
Chris J. Breisch

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