Re: Supplying a patched package

[Rob Arthan <rda@lemma-one.com>]

> On 29 Oct 2018, at 14:46, Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 10/28/2018 12:43 PM, Rob Arthan wrote:
>> I have an application that is available for the main UN*X implementations
>> and uses the OpenMotif library. It currently works fine on Cygwin using
>> the motif-2.3.6-1 package. I am working on enhancing it to use Unicode
>> and UTF-8 to display mathematical symbols and this has exposed a bug
>> in OpenMotif. I have a patch for the bug and have successfully built
>> the OpenMotif library as a DLL and tested it on Cygwin.
>> 
>> The bug has been reported but the turn-round time for a fix to OpenMotif
>> is likely to be 6 or 12 months and I don’t how long it will take for it to
>> get picked up on Cygwin (2.3.6 is 2 versions and 18 months behind the
>> latest version). So my question is what is the best way to supply my fix to
>> users on Cygwin in the interim.
>> 
>> Building the DLL seems a bit tricky, so I’d prefer users not to have to
>> do that. If I supply the DLL, then the simplest thing seems to be just
>> to include the DLL in a bin folder alongside the executable for my app.
>> Is that a robust and portable solution? Will I need to build different DLLs
>> for different architectures or can I safely assume that people running
>> on a reasonably recent MS Windows installation will only want the x86_64 DLL?
>> 
>> Apologies if the answer should be obvious: I am a reasonably proficient
>> UN*X programmer, but just a naive end-user feeling my way on MS
>> Windows. Am I right in inferring from experiments that Cygwin and/or
>> MS Windows looks for DLLs on the list of folders given $PATH and/or
>> %PATH% list but has a look in the folder containing the executable that
>> wants the DLL first?
> 
> Have you considered creating a Cygwin package for your app?  See
> 
>   https://cygwin.com/packages.html
> 
> for information about this.
> 
> As for OpenMotif, I suggest sending your patch to the cygwin-apps mailing list 
> where the motif maintainer (Yaakov) might see it and update the package.  Or you 
> could offer to take over as maintainer if Yaakov is too busy to update it and is 
> willing to give it up.
> 

Belated thanks for your advice. Creating a Cygwin package for my app (ProofPower)
sounds like a very good idea and I will look into it.

Unfortunately, the enhancements to ProofPower that needed the OpenMotif bug fix
are currently stymied on Cygwin by another problem. So I won’t need to bother anybody about
applying my patch in the short term.

Regards,

Rob.
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