On Aug 16 08:57, Fernando Gont wrote:
> On 08/16/2014 06:49 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > On Aug 16 12:29, Achim Gratz wrote:
> >> Fernando Gont writes:
> >>> My idea was to use cygwin, since I'm not much of a Windows programmer.
> >>> Is there any way to produce and ship an exe with the relevant libraries?
> >>
> >> If I understand correctly what you're trying to do, you need to obtain a
> >> commercial license from RedHat for doing so.  Otherwise, if you ship
> >> binaries linked against cygwin1.dll you need to also include all sources
> >> (for Cygwin and your own application) with each such shipment.
> > 
> > You only need the buyout license if you want to provide binaries only.
> > But this is a GPL'ed project, so I assume there's no desire to create
> > binary-only packages.
> 
> To be as honest and straightforward as possible :-): My goal is to
> provide as may options as possible. I will be producing a Cygwin package
> since that seems to be a fair way to contribute to this project. But I
> also want to address the user that just knows how to run commands from
> the windows command line and wants to quickly download & install my
> toolkit to try it. -- hence my goal of also producing some sort of
> "binary" distribution (even if the binary package also includes the source).

The binary package doesn't have to provide the sources, but your
download site would have to provide the sources of the Cygwin DLL
version you packed with your binary package.

The problem is, a user with an existing Cygwin installation might run
into trouble after installing your standalone package.  A user
installing Cygwin after installing your standalone package might run
into trouble, too.  Even though Cygwin tries its best to keep
installations separate, this breaks if multiple Cygwin DLLs of different
version numbers are in $PATH, or if the user tries to use Cygwin tools
from different installation paths on the same command line.  That's an
unfortunate side-effect of Cygwin trying to emulate a bit of an OS :}

So we'd like to ask you to install a Cygwin DLL only if there's no
Cygwin installation present.  Ideally you check if

  HKLM/Software/Cygwin/setup/rootdir or
  HKLM/Software/Cygwin/rhsetup/rootdir

or, if it's a 32 bit installation on a 64 bit Windows

  HKLM/Software/Wow6432Node/Cygwin/setup/rootdir or
  HKLM/Software/Wow6432Node/Cygwin/rhsetup/rootdir

exist and just install your tool into the Cygwin /bin path.

Alternatively, if you find a Cygwin installation, you could just point
the user to the cygwin distro to install from there.  Both solutions
don't fix the problems which might occur when installing Cygwin after
installing your tool, but we might be lucky there ;)

> I'm in the process of reading the online information to produce the
> Cygwin package. Are there any pointers to get the other stuff done?

"other stuff?"


Corinna

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