iconv for cygwin

[Christopher Abbey <cabbey at bresnanlink dot net>]

As some of you may remember last fall I committed to find a port
of iconv for cygwin, or port an existing impl if I had to. I said
I'd do it "after the new year". Well, I found one in early January
and exchanged notes with the author about packaging it up for
contribution to cygwin. (He had no objections.) In mid January I
also got a new job assignment... it's 180 degrees different from
what I've been doing for the last 2 1/2 years - and the BEST part,
is that Windows IS NOT INVOLVED. I have in the past two weeks
exorcised that wretched abomination from all but two machines in
my collection... and they're both dual booting for a couple more
weeks.  While this is a *very good thing* it does mean that I will
no longer be using Cygwin. :( I wouldn't feel right to offer up a
package that I won't be able to support, or continue forward, so
instead I'll throw this up to the user group at large and let some
one else take it forward.

The iconv library I'm talking about is Bruno Haible's, and is
available from: http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html
(He also has wide character support libraries available, which a
number of folks were interested in.) The library is LGPL, and compiles
OOTB under Cygwin. The only notes about it are that inorder to test it
you need to work on binary mounted partitions (otherwise the comparison
of the test results fails erroniously, possibly masking other errors)
and due to the lack of locale support in Cygwin the aliases file is not
generated, but it does not appear to be needed anyway. I have used the
library with Jikes successfully for a number of tests, it seems 100%
functional.

I'd like to thank Corinna, Chris, Earnie, Larry, Michael and everyone
else for helping me maintain some semblence of sanity; and congratulate
you on a fantastic product. Even though I'll not be using it much
longer, Cygwin will always be in my toolbag to help those less 
fortunate who are trapped on windows. Thank you.

-- 
now the forces of openness have a powerful and
  unexpected new ally - http://ibm.com/linux





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