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Re: RFC: Cygwin 64 bit?
On Jul 3 22:12, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-07-02 at 08:53 +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > That's it, more or less. The big advanatage in my eyes is that this
> > gives the user an early choice to move over to 64 bit. This in turn
> > gives us much more testing and more flexibility.
>
> How is this "moving over to 64-bit" if all the binaries are still 32-bit
> (not having been ported yet)?
That's the idea. There's time to port libraries and other packages one
at a time, maintainers asking other maintainers if they could please
update their stuff to 64 bit to fullfil a dependency.
> > And since there's no techical reason which disallows to have a
> > mixed 32/64 bit distro, why not do it gradually?
>
> The technical reason is this whole naming business.
You still didn't really explain why this is such an extrem problem,
afaics. And there *are* technical ways to workaround the problem.
> > Neither can I! As I said, we don't keep track of them closely, and even
> > the bits of information we have are under NDA, obviously. But that
> > wasn't the point. Yaakov asked for 32 bit binary apps and there are
> > some. There's no reason to expect they don't exist.
>
> Fine, but what *else* do they depend on?
How should I know? It's just *one* example. The other one, the chance
to move gradually from 32 to 64 bit without giving up on functionality
during the move is much more important to me. That's *my* point of view
on the issue. If everybody else wants to have a 64 bit Cygwin DLL and
64 distro entirely apart from the 32 bit Cygwin, fine with me. I just
don't believe that it helps to get a 64 bit distro even one jota. You
just exchange one set of problems for another. *My* opinion is that I
would rather have a working mix of 32 and 64 bit, combined with an early
user experience, combined with low pressure on maintainers to support 64
bit Cygwin right from the start. For that, I'm willing to trade minor
technical problems which can be worked around one way or the other.
> > I'm wondering why we didn't do this in the first place? In theory
> > there's nothing which speaks against dlopen("/path/to/libfoo.so") to
> > check for valid combinations:
> >
> > - /path/to/libfoo.so
> > - /path/to/libfoo.dll
> > - /path/to/cygfoo.dll (32 bit) or /path/to/cyg64foo.dll (64 bit)
> >
> > shouldn't that ease the pain?
>
> Somehow that sounds dangerous, but I'll reserve judgement until I see a
> patch.
What about the solution I outlined using pseudo-code in
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-developers/2011-07/msg00013.html?
Alternatively, you could come up with your own suggestion or even help
to implement it.
Corinna
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat