Re: Why are the 32- and 64-bit cygwin1.dlls incompatible?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 11:05:06AM -0400, Earnie Boyd wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>I was having a private chat with Corinna about this.
>>
>>Her doubts above mirror mine.  I wonder if this will add to the traffic
>>from people who, e.g., expect their java apps to understand Cygwin
>>ptys.  Now we will have people who don't understand why their 32-bit
>>screen doesn't work under 64-bit Cygwin mintty.
>>
>>The original error message was certainly not clear but maybe we need to
>>have something like:
>>
>>"Can't run 32-bit Cygwin programs in a 64-bit Cygwin environment"
>>
>>and vice versa with a, as you say, (ugh) way to turn this on and off.

>What about CYGWIN=32bitCygwinExec or some such?

Yes, we were talking about a CYGWIN environment variable.  It would
probably be something like "arch_mismatch".  However, you're jumping to
implementation when it isn't even clear if this is something that we
want to do.

>And what about the other direction?

Apparently "vice versa" is not a universally understood term.

>It is clear that some operations cannot occur especially pty but that
>is still true with execing any Windows program.  I don't see this
>being too big an extra burden on support.

If people don't understand why their Windows programs don't understand
Cygwin ptys I'm sure that they won't understand why their Cygwin
programs don't understand Cygwin ptys.  We just, in fact, already saw
this confusion, mainly because the error was even more confusing than
normal.

cgf

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