Re: New Install May Have a Bug

[Charles Wilson <cwilson@ece.gatech.edu>]

Roland Glenn McIntosh wrote:

 > Yes, i too noticed a few peculiarities, however i attributed them to
 >  a decision to change the default install of cygwin to a more
 > minimal approach.  Was this the case?
 >
 > I noticed that with the newer setup I have to specify that I want to
 >  install OpenSSH, less, and postgresql, possibly a few other things
 >  that used to be installed by "default"

Right -- because EVERYTHING was installed by default.

 > and which I took for
 > granted when running setup.exe on a new system.  Also - since
 > package moratorium is lifted, can cygipc be included, and marked as
 >  a dependency of postgresql (maybe once the RFC that was posed is
 > answered)?

No, cygipc was excluded for other reasons, not just because of the 
moratorium.

To work correctly, IPC functionality should be integrated into the core 
cgywin.  But, it is not possible to assign the copyright to Cygnus/Red 
Hat because it was taken from the Linux kernel, originally, and is 
covered by a multitude of different owners.  (Yes, it's GPL -- but CORE 
cygwin components, stuff that goes inside cgywin1.dll, must ALSO be 
wholly assigned to Red Hat in addition to the GPLness).

So, we'd have to track down all of those old Linux developers and 
convince them to turn over ownership of that portion of code to Red Hat. 
   Assuming we could find them all, I don't think they'd agree -- 
because that copyright assignment would also affect the current IPC code 
in the LINUX kernel...

Therefore, the cygwin developers have chosen to redo IPC functionality 
from scratch, and work is ongoing.  This isn't as bad an idea as you 
might think: even Ludovic Lange, the guy who originally grabbed the 
Linux IPC stuff out of the Linux kernel to create cygipc, agrees that 
this is the way to go.  CygIPC supports a bare minimum of IPC -- just 
enough so that Ludovic's original app worked -- and very little more. 
If we start from scratch, we can do it better.

So, why not include cygipc as a non-integral package, like readline or 
vim?  Simply expediency.  If we included it, we would lower the desire 
of folks to help us with the "real" implementation.  Therefore, we chose 
to exclude cygIPC in order to prod folks to help out with the real 
cygwin IPC implementation.  (Although, cygIPC is not *disallowed* -- you 
can still use it if you want, but you've got to get it from an external 
site.  We're not nazis).

Search the cygwin-developers mailing list for "cygwin daemon".

--Chuck


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