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Re: RFC: linux compatibility


On Fri, Oct 13, 2000 at 06:03:56PM -0400, Robinow, David wrote:
>> > My biggest concern is backwards compatibility.
>> > Is it worth Linux compatibility if it means "cygwin2.dll"?
>> 
>> The timezone API is the biggest problem here, and the most visible.
>> Changing that might break compatibility all by itself.  I haven't
>> checked into the whole story enough to know for sure.  I agree
>> backward compatibility is an important goal.
> I'm not sure "cygwin2.dll" would be such a horrible idea.
> At the cost of a little disk space you could support two versions
>without the "you've got two copies of cygwin1.dll" problem.
> Think of all the posters to this list who've said something like
>
> " I installed the latest cygwin release and it broke <name of
>critical system here>.  I've been tearing my hair out for 3 days.
>Finally I went back to old faithful B18.  [You guys suck!]"
>
> These people could simply keep a cygwin1.dll around to run
>critical apps while at their leisure fixing whatever config
>problems they have.

The only problem with this is that we would have to worry about
interoperability between cygwin2.dll and cygwin1.dll.  This could
be a big deal.

Hmm.  Some OS's have a "personality" model.  We could actually adopt
something like that.  New code could default to the "linux personality"
while older code could stil use the default "cygwin hodge-podge personality".
This might not be feasible with some things like timezone, etc.

cgf

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