Re: Making a free Windows NT POSIX subsystem?

[Larry Hall <lh-no-personal-replies-please at cygwin dot com>]

At 06:51 PM 8/29/2004, you wrote:
>I've read from archived messages that the microsoft POSIX subsystem in
>Windows NT is not good enough for Cygwin.
>
>I was curious as to weather it's possible to develop a free POSIX
>subsystem for Windows NT and use that instead.  I don't know any of
>the technical programming details and difficulties with it...
>
>How possible is this? Would this allow case-sensitivity with NTFS, and
>certain other features blocked by the Win32 subsystem?
>
>More importantly, how easy would it to maintain an NT POSIX subsystem
>port of Cygwin (assuming that a free one would be made with more
>functionality than Microsoft's) and the Win32-based Cygwin (very
>important for Windows 9x/Me)?


Splitting the base on which Cygwin is built seems like a difficult
thing to maintain.  AFAICT, the big benefit here would be the potential
for a real fork implementation.  One can have file case-sensitivity now
with Cygwin's 'check-case' environment variable setting or managed mounts.
Of course, neither of these options is fully recommended at this point 
for general usage, mostly because of the incompatibility with Windows
apps.  But that would be the same for Cygwin on some NT POSIX layer.  But 
if you've given some thought to this, perhaps you'd want to suggest the 
benefits you see to this.  In all honesty, I do think the cost of trying to 
maintain two versions of Cygwin outweighs the benefits but perhaps 
discussion of the benefits would be interesting. 



--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746                     


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