Public Cygwin 1.7 test starts today

[Warren Young]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 05:41:38PM -0700, Warren Young wrote:
>> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> after a rather long period of time of development, 
>> Is this going to change for the next major release?  There's an awful lot 
>> to absorb in this one.
> 
> If you mean for 1.9.x then there is no way to predict that.

I was just asking about intentions.  Do the core developers *want* to 
pile up new features and breakages over a period of many years and 
release them in a huge batch, or do you prefer to release smaller 
batches more often?

My preference is clearly written between the lines, but I only want to 
know what your preference is, not change it.

> It's possible that the next major release will introduce cygwin2.dll.  That
> would be a long time coming.

Do you have a sense for what would make the next major release 
cygwin2.dll and not cygwin1.dll?  Obviously an API or ABI breakage would 
require a new DLL name, but do you have something on the wish list that 
would require that, which was put off this time around?

> Given all of the features that Corinna
> added I think it's likely that 1.7.x is bigger and potentially slower to
> load.

Yes, the v1.7 cygwin1.dll I just downloaded is about 28% larger than the 
current v1.5 DLL.  This doesn't worry me.  0.7 MB is about 4 cents worth 
of RAM and disk space.  (Yes, I checked.  I'm such a geek.)  Load time 
is irrelevant to me, because I run cron; the DLL stays loaded all the 
time.  I guess the larger size could make it overflow CPU caches more 
often, but the L3 cache on Intel's newest desktop CPU is about 3.5x 
larger than the v1.7 cygwin1.dll.

What I was really asking is about execution time.  Does it run faster 
with all those if (win9x()) { ... } else { ... } logic forks removed? 
Or conversely, perhaps there's new completeness or correctness code that 
slows some things down?

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