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Re: Cygdaemon - planning


On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 03:30:09PM -0400, Nicholas Wourms wrote:
> I agree and, as I've said before, we should really mirror what glibc 
> does in terms of which libraries contain which functions come rather 
> then providing lots of silly, non-standard libraries to link against 
> which generic configure scripts aren't going to pick up.  Also, how do 
> you plan to export the symbols shmat, shmctl, shmdt, shmget?  Currently, 
> from when Conrad was working on it, I have them appended to cygwin.din 
> so that they are part of the c import library.  I hope the plan isn't to 
> use a separate import library...

I hate saying this but I think we're running into a problem with this
approach.

While cygserver is a good idea and all, we must not presume that all
users want it running.  There are a lot of people who want nothing else
but a shell, a compiler and a bunch of tools in their company or at
home.  These people don't typically need cygserver and they also
shoudn't be forced to run it.  Sometimes (say, company policy) they
even aren't allowed to run it.

What has that to do with the exported symbols?  Well, let's say somebody
builds a project for inclusion into Cygwin.  The tool has a configury
which checks if, say, shmget is available but it doesn't fail if shmget
isn't available, it just uses another technique for what it wants to do.
This tool package is included into the Cygwin distro as tool-1.0-1.  A
lot of people are using tool-1.0 and are quite happy with it.

After releasing Cygwin with cygserver, tool-1.1 is released.  Now the
package maintainer configures and builds the new version and releases
tool-1.1-1.  Unfortunately, tool-1.1-1 will refuse to run on a big bunch
of desktops.  Why?  Because tool-1.1's configure found that shmget exists
so it tries to use it but cygserver doesn't run on these target machines.

Do we want this?  Wouldn't it be better to have a separate export library
for the functions only available with cygserver?


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.


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