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Re: Resurrect discussion: Mixing 32 and 64 bit distro


On 02/12/2013 11:26 AM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 04:40:09PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Feb 12 10:29, Earnie Boyd wrote:
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Hi guys,


I slept a bit bad tonight.


As you may or may not remember, we had a discussion about how to go
forward with a 64 bit distro in 2011.

In this discussion I held vehemently to the view that we have to create
the 64 bit distro in a way which allows to mix Cygwin 64 and 32 bit
applications freely.  My main point was that it may take a long time
until we get all the Cygwin 32 bit packages built for 64 bit, and
therefore have to provide a mix so that users can adopt the 64 bit
distro early without having to drop the tools they are using.

But is that really so?  I'm not so sure anymore.  Maybe that problem
is exaggerated or overvalued.

Maybe overvalued. Would an idea that 32bit executables use the 32bit runtime and 64bit executables use the 64bit runtime be bad? So for the time being deliver both 32bit cygwin1.dll and cyg64w1.dll (I forget what you called it) and allow the executables to use the correct version?

That wasn't the question. Of course, if you mix the distros, you will have to provide two DLLs, one for 32 and one for 64 bit. The question is, shall the 32 and 64 bit Cygwin DLLs interact or not. Keep 32 and 64 bit distinct from each other or not. Even if you just mix them into one /bin, you have to keep the new cyg64 DLL prefix. But then again you would get the same result by having two distinct distros and add the other /bin dir to $PATH, without the requirement to keep the cyg64 DLL prefix.

I think two distinct distros with no explicit understanding between the 32-bit and 64-bit is the sanest approach. I hate the thought of lots of code in 64-bit Cygwin to specifically deal with 32-bit aps.

Would it be possible to write some kind of "shim" 64-bit application
which "did something" to run a 32-bit Cygwin for people who can't
wait to have their favorite package ported to 64-bit?

Sounds like a suggestion towards a Cygwin-On-Cygwin64 analog to WOW64. Ie, a cygwin1.dll as a thunk/wrapper into cyg64w1.dll similar to what wow64.dll does for WOW64 processes.


Tom.


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