Removing cygwin32-*, cygwin64-*

[Arthur Norman]

This question was asked on 9 February, and while my reply is in late 
March that is because I only found this when I installed a fresh cygwin in 
a new virtual machine and found that the cygwin64-* packages that I use 
were no longer present. For the reduce-algebra project (on sourceforge) 
the build sequences I have on Windows really like having all the building 
done from a single shell, so that it can be automated and a single call to 
"make" at the top level builds win32, win64, cygwin32 and cygwin64 
variants... and I then take steps so that when a user tries to launch the 
program it invokes the relevant one of one of those four binaries, 
depending on the context it was launched from. I have not had trouble with 
the cross build of 64 bit executables from the 32-bit world, but have not 
moved to running in a 64-bit cygwin world in part because the full sey of 
cross 32-bit libraries were not provided there - I had expected that to be 
a transient as 64-bit cygwin stabilised and matured. I had even hoped to 
dream that invoking a 64-bin cygwin binary from a 32-bit shell and vice 
versa might eventually happen!
So I will note that I am sad that the cross-compilation capability has 
been withdrawn, and I rather feel that the small collection of responses 
to a question that asks "is anybody using..." by saying "never used them" 
and "I gave up" only say that THOSE people wopuld not be inconvenieced, 
and are to my mind not good evidence that none of us would be.

Using the cross-build scheme it is trivial to have (eg) a cron script or 
access via ssh build both 32 and 64-bit everything. When 32 and 64-bit 
cygwins are fully separate worlds while I know I will be able to cope it 
is more delicate, more messy and extra work for me.

I can on the other hand understand that for cygwin maintainers that 
looking after and checking both 32 and 64-bit worlds and then cross 
environments in both directions adds to work, and that is really valuable 
work that I am not being asked to pay for, so I am not in a position to 
express outrege - merely distress! I guess my best emergency response to 
this has to be to comment out places in my build where I support the 
version of cygwin I am not running under.

Arthur Norman


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple