GCL and dependencies on cygwin

[Brian Inglis]

On 2025-03-09 08:16, Camm Maguire via Cygwin wrote:
> Greetings, and thank you all for your work on this system.
> 1) I am preparing a set of GCL releases, both of which basically work on
> latest cygwin, but the signal handling seems to have been recently
> broken.  Specifically, GCL can trap and handle SIGFPE when these
> exceptions are enabled.  Under gdb, the signal appears, but then a
> SIGTRAP is caught in kernel.dll under secure_getenv(), and the handler
> is never called.  Thoughts?

Which release?

	$ uname -srvmo

If current stable 3.5.7, try the latest 3.6.0-0.42?.g* test releases, which have 
a number of signal handling fixes and improvements, still being reworked to 
conform to more specs and expected operation, with hundreds of 
processors/threads, and thousands of concurrent processes/threads used at some 
large European research institutes.

> 2) I am considering volunteering as a maintainer.  I see the docs
> describing the procedure.  I maintain some packages for Debian, and
> wondering if there was any simplification in avoiding duplicate work
> here.

Some Cygwin packagers/maintainers also develop or support the packages on other 
distros.

Cygwin has some common heritage from Fedora like policies, similar to DFSG, 
package naming, and usages like -devel and -debuginfo vs -dev or -dbg, but 
*cygport* is closer to Gentoo portage ebuilds, implemented in bash, and for some 
packages can do a lot of rote grunt work for you, that you have to explicitly 
define for Debian etc.

	https://cygwin.com/git/cygwin-packages/

for example:

	https://cygwin.com/git/?p=git/cygwin-packages/clisp.git;a=summary

	https://cygwin.github.io/cygport/toc_index.html

or install cygport and access:

	$ cygstart /usr/share/doc/cygport/html/manual/toc_index.html

which should open the docs in your default Windows browser.

For new ports or modernizing adopted packages, I hacked a script to check Fedora 
and OpenSuSE sources for spec files, download if not already available locally, 
and do a "good enough" ~90% conversion to cygport.

So far, for only a few Debian sources, I found it easier to download the debian/ 
directory, cat or cp the relevant files (mostly dsc, control, and rules) then 
cygport-ize or Cygwin-ize the contents.
But you may find it helps you adapt if you hack your own download and conversion 
script in your favourite associative memory language.

I have also found Fedora, OpenSuSE, and Debian sources useful for patches.

In general, these topics are best discussed on cygwin-apps, to which all 
packagers, maintainers, and contributors are expected to subscribe.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis              Calgary, Alberta, Canada

La perfection est atteinte                   Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter  not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retrancher  but when there is no more to cut
                                 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry