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Re: FAQ suggestion


On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 05:37:09PM -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
>OK, third draft:
>
>Q. I want to bundle Cygwin with a product, and ship it to customer
>sites.  How can I do this without conflicting with any Cygwin
>installed by the user?
>
>A.  Third party developers who wish to use Cygwin should check if
>there is a version of cygwin installed and use the installed
>version if it is newer, or conditionally upgrade if it is not.
>(This is same scheme used by Microsoft with great success
>for its runtime DLLs for many years. If someone wrote a nice
>utility for doing this type of checking, the Cygwin developers
>would be happy to put it somewhere on the Cygwin site.)
>
>Also, remember that by distributing your project which depends on cygwin,
>you are bound by the license agreement, http://cygwin.com/licensing.html.
>Your application must either be under the GPL, or you must purchase a
>support contract through Red Hat; and if you choose to distribute
>cygwin1.dll, you must also ensure that you provide the cygwin source code
>that matches what you distribute.
>
>Q.  Can I install a private version of cygwin that doesn't conflict
>with the system cygwin (in the same way that multiple versions
>of Wine can coexist)?
>A. The Cygwin maintainers will resist any suggestion to support
>this, no matter how sensible it might sound to you.
>
>Q. But doesn't that mean that if some application installs
>an older Cygwin library, my application will break?
>A. Yes.  Tough.  Don't install applications like that.
>
>Q. Doesn't this mean that Cygwin is fragile?
>A. No.  Cygwin is *right*.  It's those other applications, or perhaps
>the users, or both, that are wrong.

Q.  I'm an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to take a bunch of your
binaries, recompile them with -O3 for speed! and sell them to make some
$$$.  I've noticed that when my users install my version of "super ssh"
(now with full color support!) along with my copy of cygwin1.dll
(version 25.1.7) it conflicts with already installed versions of
cygwin1.dll.  Please fix this as it affects my bottom line.

A.  What were we thinking?  How could we have been so stupid?  We
thought we were contributing our time and effort to the "Cygwin Project"
but here we were insensitively ignoring all of those people who just
wanted to suck down the binaries and sources that we make available and
use them in a manner that they deem convenient.

One of our tech support staff will be contacting you shortly to gather
details of your exact specifications.

Q.  I found that by adding one to a magic number in the cygwin sources
(which I've managed to figure out how to compile *myself*, please
applaud) I can run two versions of cygwin1.dll *at* *the* *same* *time*.
You are obviously evil and keeping this simple technique hidden just to
piss people off.

A.  Hey.  That wasn't a question.  But, yes, you found us out.  That's
the only thing you have to do.  Change one magic number.

Q.  Hey.  I just found out that sometimes when I start bash and run a
program I linked against my NEW version of cygwin (which I built
*myself*, I know you must be impressed) it segvs or the arguments look
funny.  I found *another* magic number.  You people are truly deranged
and evil.

A.  Once again, not a question.  But, you're right.  You've found the
last thing that you need to change.

Q.  Now wait a minute.  I want my own mount table.  Why are you making
this so difficult?  What earthly reason can you have for not making the
mount table configurable so that I can choose whatever registry key I
want?  I had to change another location in the DLL.

A.  At last some embedded questions.  But, yes, we must be slipping.  We
forgot that the mount table would give you issues too.

Q.  When I start up rxvt and run one of the programs that I built
against my own version of cygwin (which my friend showed me how to link
despite the fact that there are no instructions), my program doesn't
work quite right.  When it reads from the terminal it doesn't recognize
that it's getting input from a tty.  The output gets garbled sometimes
or there is no output until the program exits.  Could you please fix
this?

A. Just a minute.

*pause*

Ok.  It's fixed.

Q.  Now what are you trying to pull?  I tried to build a version of bash
against my new, improved version of cygwin (now with full color support)
and it is truncating the command line when I try to run one of your
stupid, slow, standard cygwin binaries.  Are you hacking my computer to
cause me problems?

A.  It has cmoe to our attenton that your account has been comprimised.
Please go to http://cygwin.com/myaccount/ immediately and enter your
social security number, bank routing number, and your mother's maidin
name if you want to keep receiving future versions of CygWIN.

Hurry now, CygWIN now has full color support!  You don't want to miss
this new versoin!

cgf

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