Problems with xterm as distributed (Error 14, errno 2: No such file or directory) and solution

[Ton van Overbeek <tvoverbe at cistron dot nl>]

Hello,

I've been using the Cygwin Xfree86 release to port a large Unix based
application
to the Cygwin/Xfree environment.
The application uses a Tcl/Tk based front-end which starts up an xterm
to do the
actual work.
The startup of the xterm fails with 'xterm: Error 14, errno 2: No such
file or directory'.
This issue came up also early last year on the mailing list: see the
thread starting
with http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q1/msg00-275.html.
This thread did not give the cause of the problem. Some more looking
around on the
net showed that the problem is caused when xterm is started without a
controlling
terminal. This is exactly what happens in my case when started from a
Tcl/Tk procedure.
Looking at the xterm XFree86 sourcecode in the CVS at www.xfree86.org it
turns out
the problem has already been solved with CYGWIN specific code in main.c
(accepts ENOENT as a return code when trying to open /dev/tty in
function spawn()).
So I grabbed a copy of the xterm sources (xc/programs/xterm), recompiled
and it is working now.

An other issue is that the xterm application defaults are not installed.
They are not in the cygwin/xfree86 distribution and also did not get
installed
by 'make install' after my recompilation.
After doing a 'touch' on XTerm.ad and XTerm-col.ad they got installed.
Some date/time confusion between Windows & Cygwin ??

I would suggest to replace the xterm in the distribution by the one from
the current xf_4_1 branch and also to include the app default files.

Regards,

Ton van Overbeek