Cygwin 3.5 is coming soon, please test!

Cygwin 3.5 is coming soon, please test!

[Corinna Vinschen]

Hi folks,


we're planning to release Cygwin 3.5 end of this month (Jan 2024) if
nothing serious crops up.

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One major change in this release is dropping Windows 7, Windows 8,
Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012 from the list of
supported operating systems.

For those of you still running one of these old systems (despite
them all being unsupported and unpatched by the vendor), we will
keep the last 3.4 release (3.4.10) available for quite some time.

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The minimum supported OS version when running Cygwin 3.5 will be
Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

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In this phase of development, we concentrate mainly on avoiding
regressions from 3.4.10.

It would be kind if some of you would start testing, by downloading
the test release. The last test release at the moment of writing this
mail is

  cygwin		3.5.0-0.560.g07cccc74a5da

Latest documentation is

  cygwin-doc		3.5.0-0.560.g07cccc74a5da

Developers developing Cygwin applications should also switch to
the matching developer files:

  cygwin-devel		3.5.0-0.560.g07cccc74a5da

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What's new:
-----------

- Drop support for Windows 7, Windows 8, Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012.

- Console devices (/dev/consN) are now accessible by processes attached
  to other consoles or ptys. Thanks to this new feature, GNU screen and
  tmux now work in the console.

- newgrp(1) tool.

- cygcheck has new options searching for available packages in the
  cygwin distro, as well as getting extended info on available and
  installed packages.

- fnmatch(3) and glob(3) now support named character classes, equivalence
  class expressions, and collating symbols in the search pattern, i.e.,
  [:alnum:], [=a=], [.aa.].

- Introduce /dev/disk directory with various by-* subdirectories which
  provide symlinks to disk and partition raw devices:
  by-drive/DRIVE_LETTER ->  ../../sdXN
  by-label/VOLUME_LABEL ->  ../../sdXN
  by-id/BUSTYPE-[VENDOR_]PRODUCT_[SERIAL|0xHASH][-partN] -> ../../sdX[N]
  by-partuuid/MBR_SERIAL-OFFSET -> ../../sdXN
  by-partuuid/GPT_GUID -> ../../sdXN
  by-uuid/VOLUME_SERIAL -> ../../sdXN
  by-voluuid/MBR_SERIAL-OFFSET -> ../../sdXN
  by-voluuid/VOLUME_GUID -> ../../sdXN
  The subdirectories by-drive and by-voluuid are Cygwin specific.

- Introduce /proc/codesets and /proc/locales with information on
  supported codesets and locales for all interested parties.  Locale(1)
  opens these files and uses the info for printing locale info like any
  other process could do.

- Add support for GB18030 codeset.

- Add support for lseek flags SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE, a GNU extension.

- New API calls: posix_spawn_file_actions_addchdir_np,
  posix_spawn_file_actions_addfchdir_np.

- New API calls: c8rtomb, c16rtomb, c32rtomb, mbrtoc8, mbrtoc16, mbrtoc32.

- New API call: close_range (available on FreeBSD and Linux).

- New API call: fallocate (Linux-specific).

- Implement OSS-based sound mixer device (/dev/mixer).

What changed:
-------------

- posix_spawnp no longer falls back to starting the shell for unrecognized
  files as execvp.  For the reasoning, see
  https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1674

- FIFOs now also work on NFS filesystems.

- Enable automatic sparsifying of files on SSDs, independent of the
  "sparse" mount mode.

- When RLIMIT_CORE is more than 1MB, a core dump file which can be loaded by gdb
  is now written on a fatal error. Otherwise, if it's greater than zero, a text
  format .stackdump file is written, as previously.

- The default RLIMIT_CORE is now 0, disabling the generation of core dump or
  stackdump files.