Re: [gentoo-cygwin] interest in gentoo-cygwin

[Trevor Forbes]

Patrick Lauer wrote:

>Well -
>
>first you'd need to fix portage for Cygwin usage. Small stuff:
>- user/group check is not reliable in windows
>	* either remove or add "root" and "portage" users
>- there's some userland check that fails, need to append WINNT5.0 if I
>recall correctly
>- there were some path issues, I think those are fixed - hardcoded paths
>need to be fixed
>
>So portage mostly runs.
>emerge sync doesn't work as we have a few ebuilds with ":" in the name
>--> cygwin interprets that as a drive letter
>--> write a sane rsync_exclude (or better, start a cygwin-only ebuild
>repo)
>
>Now you try bootstrapping.
>--> the linker used to be really dumb and wasn't capable of repeated
>compiles.
>	* if that still exists the linker needs to be fixed - this will be
>tricky
>--> glibc doesn't exist on Cygwin, the cygwin libc is evil
>	* either write an ebuild for cygwin-libc providing virtual/libc or port
>glibc
>	* I never managed to build cygwin-libc from scratch, it's evil :-)
>	* porting glibc will be _a lot_ of work, cygwin libc is incomplete
>--> many packages need lots of patching
>	* extract patches from cygwin repositories, apply to ebuilds and test
>	* never managed to get gcc to build, that'll be lots of testing until
>it works reliably
>--> now you should have a smallish system that can "emerge -e system"
>
>--> create an install image like the cygwin installer that plops in a
>stage3 equivalent
>
>--> start porting as many ebuilds as you can
>
>People with some spare time and lots of motivation can try "Services for
>Unix" instead of Cygwin
>as far as I can tell it's not as buggy, but has been crippled so that
>it's not easy to use.
>
>Cygwin and SFU can co-exist and should share 99% of code, so trying both
>is acceptable
>
>I don't have the time for actual coding/testing now, but I'm willing to
>provide ressources (rsync repo, cvs / svn repo, coordination)
>
>If there are any questions left feel free to ask!
>
>wkr,
>Patrick
>
>
>
These are "nice to know" points. If you remember anything else, pls let 
me know. Tks

I have started to working on it (for fun) in my spare time and I am 
having some success. I have set up the user/group in Cygwin to look more 
like Linux which is mostly working. I added the os definitions which 
were missing from portage. I am now at the stage where the file locks 
are not getting removed.

The ":" might be tricky, however, I could use a managed mount for 
portage. Perhaps the offending packages could simply be renamed.

I am only interested in getting Cygwin working so SFU not in my scope. I 
have not found Cygwin buggy, and even if it were broken, its just code 
that can be fixed... Do you have examples...


Tks
Trevor

  




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