1.7-specific packages

1.7-specific packages

[Andy Koppe]

Hi,

I'd been under the impression that I'd need to create a separate
mintty package for cygwin-1.7, but was glad to find that actually
0.3.5-1 is already there. Many packages do have 1.7-specific versions
though, so my question is, under what sorts of circumstances does that
become necessary?

Andy

Re: 1.7-specific packages

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Mar 13 06:34, Andy Koppe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd been under the impression that I'd need to create a separate
> mintty package for cygwin-1.7, but was glad to find that actually
> 0.3.5-1 is already there. Many packages do have 1.7-specific versions
> though, so my question is, under what sorts of circumstances does that
> become necessary?

If your package potentially uses one of the features in 1.7.
For instance:

- Does your code use sockets and is potentially IPv6 aware?

- Does your code use static filename buffers of size MAXPATHLEN,
  PATH_MAX or MAX_PATH, or do you allocate filename buffers using
  these defines?  If so, drop all usage of MAX_PATH in favor of
  PATH_MAX.  Or, even better, don't expect pathnames to have a
  max size at all.

- For more ideas what's new see the list of new features in
  http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2009-03/msg00043.html


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

Re: 1.7-specific packages

[Charles Wilson]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Mar 13 06:34, Andy Koppe wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd been under the impression that I'd need to create a separate
>> mintty package for cygwin-1.7, but was glad to find that actually
>> 0.3.5-1 is already there. Many packages do have 1.7-specific versions
>> though, so my question is, under what sorts of circumstances does that
>> become necessary?
> 
> If your package potentially uses one of the features in 1.7.

In my case, I'm (slowly) creating 1.7-specific packages for all of the
ones that I maintain -- whether "necessary" or not.  Obviously, not
every maintainer is going to do that.  My reasons are:

1) I want to ensure that all of my packages are up to scratch when 1.7
itself goes non-beta. This is one way to do that.

2) Many of my packages are libraries -- and fairly core ones, like
ncurses and zlib. I had been planning to "DLL version bump" all of my
libraries when I rebuild the packages (again) using gcc4 -- which would
require a different set of packages -- even different package names,
like libncurses10 vs. libncurses9 -- on cygwin1.7.  More on this in
Yaakov's "[RFC] ABI bump for building with gcc4 ?" thread.

3) Since I *am* planning to rebuild all of my packages using gcc4 -- but
only for cygwin-1.7 -- that right there is a reason for
cygwin-1.7-specific packages.  I'm just jumping the gun a little early
-- e.g. while still using gcc3 -- to ensure that at least my build
process and each individual package itself still "works" okay under 1.7
without any additional (future) changes like using gcc4.

But, in most cases, whether you release 1.7-specific packages is
up to your own preference, as the maintainer.

--
Chuck