Re: MinGW support

On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 11:46 AM Cyril Arnould <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi! I was wondering if there's a possibilty for GNU findutils to
> officially start supporting MinGW-w64.


To set your expectations, this email isn't going to answer that question.


> It has been ported before as
> part of both the GnuWin32 and ezwinports projects, those however are
> based on by now rather dated versions of findutils which come from
> before the introduction of the fts based find command.
>

It probably also works/worked under Cygwin.

>
> Last year, I have worked on a port of the newest findutils release
> based off the patches in the ezwinports project. As far as I'm aware,
> the issues that the patches address are not covered by Gnulib as of
> yet. The changes can still quite easily be rebased onto master in case
> you want to take a look:
>
> https://github.com/cyrilarnould/findutils


This repo is a fork of jamesyoungman/findutils:master but that is a
(frequently very out of date) mirror of the real findutils git repository,
which is on Savannah, not github (see
https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=findutils for details).

If you'd like to discuss next steps, the first thing to do is rebase your
changes against the current git master branch on Savannah.

I haven't looked at your changes, since right now you're about 58 changes
behind Savannah, so there would be lots of distracting irrelevant diffs.



> I'm quite happy with how it turned out in terms of functionality, but
> some of the changes are quite hacky and probably need polishing before
> they could be included. Me being very inexperienced in C programming
> and the workflow around autotools didn't help. Some newer features I
> just skipped because I did not know how I would implement them; they
> were not around in the ezwinports version either.
>

I think it's unlikely that the findutils maintainers will accept "hacky"
changes for the benefit of MinGW if it compromises the code quality for
other systems (e.g. GNU/Linux distributions).

I would expect there to be a great many difficulties with such a project.
For example, Windows filenames don't conform to the expectations of
POSIX-like systems, which is what the find implementation expects.    Some
differences will be obvious but others not.   For example AIUI in Windows,
C:\WINDOWS\NUL and C:\USERS\JAMES\NUL are the same file, but it would
likely be difficult to get the expected result with -samefile.

I think I get the idea of why someone would want to use the MinGW GCC to
build programs, but what's the advantage of using a version of find built
with MinGW instead of using WSL, for example?