Re: Unidentified subject!

Arnau Marcé wrote:
> I'm working on it since laast Monday... In a few weeks you'll have debian's
> base system ported to cygwin (I really hope so  ;)    ).
> 
> Now, I've 18 ported packages to win32. Some of the base system an some not.

Uh huh.

| john@jardiniere ~
| $ dpkg -l | wc -l
|      55

Hurrah for me. But not really. All the 'porting' involves in most cases 
is a few tweaks to debian files (rules, postinst) or includes. There are 
some basic problems to be solved before this project can really start 
moving. A few off the top of my head...

Apt doesn't work. I've not looked at it yet, shouldn't be too hard, but 
it certainly doesn't compile ATM.

The .exe suffix screws things up. A lot of packages identify the target 
as Cygwin, and your executables then get that extension. Then the build 
fails because a filename is hard-coded in a makefile somewhere 
(debian/rules, for example). If you ask me, the .exe has to go. No other 
Debian platform uses an extension for exectuables, and you're not going 
to persuade everyone to change their packages to accommodate it. So I 
guess that means fixing config.guess, so it can identify Debian win32 
systems and act appropriately; then and rebuilding gcc. Something like that.

Then there's the filename problem -- normally, Windows doesn't do 
certain characters, for example colons. You'll hit this one building 
packages for perl-doc, defoma, spamassassin, countless Perl modules, 
etc. Apparently you can turn on POSIX compliance, which sounds like the 
way to go. In a previous discussion I think people suggested patching 
newlib to substitute another character, but I don't like the idea of 
changing filenames. It just opens up more potential problems (eg 
breaking hard-coded filenames in scripts and configs, risks clashes with 
other files in Debian, etc).

Those three are just for starters. The first few packages build, and you 
think "hey, this is doable", but in truth, getting even the base system 
working properly (i.e. building cleanly, not just fiddling it) is going 
to need some serious work by someone who knows what they're doing.

If it's achieved "in a few weeks", I'll eat my hat.

-- 
John Ineson