[HEADSUP] Start of Cygwin 1.7 release cycle

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

Hi all,

we're now finally starting the release cycle for Cygwin 1.7.  Not
everything is in it's place, some changes are still in flux and the
installation is still somewhat bumpy but we should get to all of that
while testing goes on.

We have set up a new release area which is dedicated to the 1.7 release.
This allows us to test the new Cygwin DLL in a complete distro
environment without breaking the standard release.  This standard
release will get frozen at one point, when we think it's safe enough to
switch the community to the new distro.  The old one stays available for
Windows 95/98/Me users.  So far the new release area is a copy of the
existing one.  To access it, you have to use a special setup.exe version
you get from http://cygwin.com/setup-1.7.exe

The idea is this:

- You set up a local Cygwin 1.7 installation.  

- You build the packages you maintain under that Cygwin 1.7 release.

- You prepare the packages for uploading into the 1.7 release area.

- You report bugs to the cygwin list (maybe we should set up a
  temporary cygwin-test mailing list for a couple of months?).

Over the time the Cygwin 1.7 release area will be populated with
corresponding packages.  The more packages we have, the easier
will get further testing, especially for the two most intrusive
changes, IPv6 support and long path names.

However, right now we have still a problem.

The new Cygwin DLL uses /etc/fstab and /etc/fstab.d/$USER files instead
of the registry for the mount table.  While this decouples the new
release from an old one in terms of mount points, setup.exe still
accesses and creates registry mount points and stumbles over that.

As a result, for now I'd suggest to install Cygwin 1.7 only if you
have a spare machine or in a distinct virtual machine.  Once setup
can deal with a parallel 1.5 release, this gets much easier.

Below you'll find a list of the major changes from 1.5 to 1.7.  Please
read it carefully.

The most important changes on the user level are the long path name
support including UTF-8 character support, as well as IPv6.  Other
changes are also important, but these two will likely have the most
impact.  I'd like to ask you to keep an eye especially on them when
building and testing.

The most important changes on the application level are the new Cygwin
functions for path name conversion between DOS and POSIX filenames
which, in contrast to the previous functions, allow long path names.
The old functions are marked as obsolete in the header file, so you will
get approrpiate warnings if your application is using them.  The new
functions are already documented (including example code), though, for
the time being, only in the Cygwin sources (see
winsup/cygwin/path.sgml).

Please note that, besides other stuff, two really crucial changes are
still missing:

- Native Language Support and the character set handling according to
  $LANG and $LC_CTYPE is still lacking.  I'm glad to report that
  Kazuhiro Fujieda volunteered to work on that.  For now, you have to
  set CYGWIN="codepage:utf8" as well as LC_CTYPE="C-UTF-8" to get UTF-8
  support working.  This should get much simpler and better after
  Kazuhiro's patches.  

- Documentation (Heeeeelp!)

Ok, if something is unclear, feel free to ask.  Other than that, enjoy
the below list of changes and the new functionality.


Corinna


Wind^WList of Changes:
======================

OS releated changes:
--------------------

- Windows 95, 98 and Me are not supported anymore.  The new DLL will
  not run on any of these systems.

File Access related changes:
----------------------------

- Mount points are no longer stored in the registry.  Use /etc/fstab
  and /etc/fstab.d/$USER instead.  Mount points created with mount(1)
  are only local to the current session and disappear when the last
  Cygwin process in the session exits.

- PATH_MAX is now 4096.  Internally, path names can be as long as the
  underlying OS can handle (32K).
  
- UTF-8 filenames are supported now.  So far, this requires to set
  the environment variable CYGWIN to contain "codepage:utf8", but this
  will likely disappear in a few weeks time.  The setting of $LANG or
  $LC_CTYPE will be used instead.

- Creating filenames with special DOS characters '"', '*', ':', '<',
  '>', '|' is supported.

- Creating files with special DOS device filename components ("aux",
  "nul", "prn") is supported.

- Managed mounts are now identical to normal mounts, except they allow
  to create files only differing by case ("abc", "Abc", ABC").

- unlink(2) and rmdir(2) try very hard to remove files/directories even
  if they are currently accessed or locked.  This is done by utilizing
  the hidden recycle bin directories and marking the files for deletion.

- rename(2) rewritten to be more POSIX conformant.

- Add st_birthtim member to struct stat.

- File locking is now advisory, not mandatory anymore.  The fcntl(2) and
  the new lockf(2) APIs create and maintain locks with POSIX semantics,
  the flock(2) API creates and maintains locks with BSD semantics.
  POSIX and BSD locks are independent of each other.

- Implement atomic O_APPEND mode.

- Handle NTFS native symlinks available since Vista/2008 as symlinks.

- Recognize Netapp DataOnTap drives and fix inode number handling.

- Recognize Samba version beginning with Samba 3.0.28a using the new
  extended version information negotiated with the Samba developers.

- Support Linux-like extended attributes ([fl]getxattr, [fl]listxattr,
  [fl]setxattr, [fl]removexattr).

- New file conversion API for conversion from Win32 to POSIX path and
  vice versa (cygwin_conv_path, cygwin_create_path, cygwin_conv_path_list).

- Other new APIs: posix_fadvise, posix_fallocate, funopen, fopencookie,
  fdopendir.

Network related changes:
------------------------

- New implementation for blocking sockets and select on sockets which
  is supposed to allow POSIX-compatible sharing of sockets between
  threads and processes.

- Restrict send/sendto/sendmsg to send never more than 64K to circumvent
  internal buffer problem in WinSock.  (May need rework)

- IPv6 support.  New API getaddrinfo, getnameinfo, freeaddrinfo,
  gai_strerror, in6addr_any, in6addr_loopback.  On IPv6-less systems,
  replacement functions are available for IPv4.  On systems with IPv6
  enabled, the underlying WinSock functions are used.  While I tried
  hard to get the functionality as POSIXy as possible, keep in mind that
  a *fully* conformant implementation of getaddrinfo and other stuff is
  only available starting with Windows Vista/2008.

- Resolver functions (res_init, res_query, res_search, res_querydomain,
  res_mkquery, res_send, dn_comp, dn_expand) are now part of Cygwin.
  Applications don't have to link against minires anymore.  Actually,
  this *is* the former libminires.a.

- rcmd is now implemented inside of Cygwin, instead of calling the
  WinSock function.  This allows rsh(1)  usage on Vista/2008, which
  dropped this function from WinSock.

- Define multicast structures in netinet/in.h.  Note that fully
  conformant multicast support is only available beginning with Vista/2008.

- Improve get_ifconf.  Redefine struct ifreq and subsequent datastructures
  to be able to keep more information.  Support SIOCGIFINDEX, SIOCGIFDSTADDR
  and the Cygwin specific SIOCGIFFRNDLYNAM.  Support real interface flags
  on systems supporting them.

- Other new APIs: bindresvport, bindresvport_sa, iruserok_sa, rcmd_af,
  rresvport_af.  getifaddrs, freeifaddrs, if_nametoindex, if_indextoname,
  if_nameindex, if_freenameindex.

- Add /proc/net/if_inet6.

Device related changes:
-----------------------

- Reworked pipe implementation which uses overlapped IO to create
  more reliable interruptible pipes and fifos.

- Reworked pipe handling for better speed and better support for signal
  processing.

- Improved fifo handling.

- Detect when a stdin/stdout which looks like a pipe is really a tty.
  Among other things, this allows a debugged application to recognize that
  it is using the same tty as the debugger.

- Support UTF-8 in console window.

- Support up to 64 serial interfaces using /dev/ttyS0 - /dev/ttyS63.

- Support up to 128 raw disk drives /dev/sda - /dev/sddx.

- New API: posix_openpt.

Other POSIX related changes:
----------------------------

- Implement pthread_kill(thread, 0) as per POSIX.

- New API for POSIX IPC:
  Named semaphores: sem_open, sem_close, sem_unlink.
  Message queues: mq_open, mq_getattr, mq_setattr, mq_notify, mq_send,
  mq_timedsend, mq_receive, mq_timedreceive, mq_close, mq_unlink.
  Shared memory: shm_open, shm_unlink.

- Only declare expected functions in <strings.h>, don't include <string.h>
  from here.

- New APIs: asnprintf, dprintf, _Exit, vasnprintf, vdprintf, confstr,
  posix_madvise, posix_memalign, exp10, exp10f, pow10, pow10f, lrint,
  lrintf, rint, rintf, llrint, llrintf, llrintl, lrintl, rintl insque,
  remque, sys_sigabbrev, strcasestr, stpcpy, stpncpy, wcpcpy, wcpncpy,
  wcstol, wcstoll, wcstoul, wcstoull, wcsxfrm.

Security related changes:
-------------------------

- Getting a domain user's groups is hopefully more bulletproof now.

- Cygwin now comes with a real LSA authentication package.  This must
  be manually installed by a privileged user using the /bin/cyglsa-config
  script.  The advantages and disadvantages are noted in
  http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-developers/2006-11/msg00000.html

- Drop CYGWIN=ntea fake.

Miscellanous:
-------------

- Fallout from the long path names: If the current working directory is
  longer than 260 bytes, or if the current working directory is a virtual
  path (like /proc, /cygdrive, //server), don't call native Win32 programs
  since they don't understand these paths.

- On the first usage of a DOS path (C:\foo, \\foo\bar), the Cygwin DLL
  emits a scary warning that DOS paths shouldn't be used.  There's also
  the new CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning setting to disable that.

- Allow environment of arbitrary size instead of a maximum of 32K.

- Detect and report a missing DLL on process startup.

- Add /proc/registry32 and /proc/registry64 paths to access 32 bit and
  64 bit registry on 64 bit systems.

- Align /proc/cpuinfo more closly to Linux content.

- Optimized strstr and memmem implementation.

- Remove backwards compatibility with old signal masks (some *very* old
  programs which use signal masks may no longer work correctly).

- Numerous bug fixes.

- Probably a couple of entirely new bugs.

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