Re: Angel not present

[Fernando Nasser <fnasser at redhat dot com>]

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:
> 
> Hi Fernando,
> 
> > > >2) Old versions of Cygwin had a problem with the serial port.  The
> > >
> > > I have observed this problem with Cygwin 1.1.8, which is the currently
> > > downloadable version. It can be alleviated a _little_ by disabling FIFOs on
> > > the host-side's serial port. However the debugging link is still very, very
> > > fragile, especially in Win9x.
> >
> >I have never seen this problem on recent Cygwins, but it maybe because I
> >use NT4.0 and Win2000.  Cygwin was designed (and it is only officially
> 
> I am observing the problem _right now_ on this Win2000 system. It's not a
> Win9x-specific problem, though I surely do know there are many of those.
> 

In this case, I think you should post a note to the Cygwin people.  They
may know about the problem or, if not, I am sure they want to be told
about it.

If you follow the Cygwin pointer at http://sources.redhat.com  you will
find their list address (I can't remember from the top of my head).



> >My experience with Win9x was disastrous for everything else as well.  I
> >had a machine with the MS office stuff plus Quicken and some other off
> >the shelf Windows applications.  At least one crash and one reboot a
> >day.  Until I gave up and upgraded to NT.
> 
> Well, we won't argue OS merits. However I will point out the issue that
> continues to annoy the hell out of me with cygwin and Win9x: I will only
> ever use cygwin for embedded development. So it is an embedded development
> environment. Yet many/most embedded toolchains, ICEs, etc don't work
> properly in NT (including Win2K). So I am left juggling OSs every time I
> want to burn an EPROM and so on. Not supporting Win9x (DOS+Windows type)
> technology in an embedded toolchain is very unfriendly.
> 

I never heard the "DOS" argument before.  It makes sense.  But I guess
it may become irrelevant -- Microsoft stopped selling Win9x altogether. 
It seems that there is no current way of buying it, just Millennium and
2000.

Anyway, I believe the "non-support" for Win9x was not a choice by the
Cygwin folks, but imposed by the limitations and bugs of Win9x.  But I
am not the right person to comment on this: again the Cygwin list would
be the appropriate forum to get some clarifications.


> If I have to juggle OSs anyway, I may as well juggle to Linux, which works
> about 1000% better for embedded dev than cygwin+NT (it's so much faster on
> builds, much more responsive to interrupts, cheaper, more reliable, roughly
> the same lack of support from embedded hardware vendors,...). So the
> justification for supporting a cygwin that doesn't work properly in 9x is
> pretty thin.
> 


I still don't understand why I don't see this problem.  We must have
some different setup somewhere.  I haven't done anything too heavy in
the 2000 machine though, only in the NT4.0 one.  Would it be some 2000
problem?  I think you should definitively post to the Cygwin list...



Regards,
Fernando



-- 
Fernando Nasser
Red Hat Canada Ltd.                     E-Mail:  fnasser@redhat.com
2323 Yonge Street, Suite #300
Toronto, Ontario   M4P 2C9