Re: MSYS mode (continue)

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@cygwin.com>]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 02:20:50PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
>> But underlying there's still a normal Cygwin DLL and
>> most tools could just be copied verbatim since they don't need this
>> extra functionality.
>
>And that's the bit where I disagree.  Sure, some scripting tools might 
>not need adjustment, so long as their interpreter was $MSYS-enabled 
>(e.g. automake -> msys-perl, msys-bash) -- because the script will "see" 
>dos-style paths, so its interpreter better be able to handle them.
>
>But unless you restrict yourself to only passing around relative paths 
>(or god forbid, that old "unity mount" idea), any .exe will need to live 
>in one world or the other. Otherwise, how would paths be interpreted? 
>Using which tools' mount table?
>
>Naturally from the command line I can compensate:
>
>msys$  /c/cygwin/bin/foobar.exe $(/c/cygwin/bin/cygpath.exe -u $(cygpath 
>-d /msys/mount/table/path) )
>
>but yee gods that'd be annoying in any automated setting.

I don't know if this helps but the vague plan is to now have two DLLs
where before you only had one.  You'd still be providing "MSYS" binaries
which relied on "MSYS.dll" but, under the hood, MSYS.dll would be only a
small dll which relied on cygwin1.dll for all of the heavy lifting.

You'd still have a normal MSYS distribution and it would still, in theory,
support everything (with the possible exception of very lax security) that
the old MSYS did.  An MSYS release would consist of MSYS*.dll, cygwin1.dll,
bash, etc.

I don't think anyone was proposing seamless interoperation between MSYS
and cygwin.

The reason that this came about was because someone was proposing an MSYS2
so, rather than take another copy of the cygwin source code and hack on
it again, Corinna thought maybe we could do something to minimize the fork.

cgf