This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

RE: Problem to open big selfextracting Zip files from bash - Multiple Environment discussion


First,

LIST: I apologize for hurting anyone's feelings.
      Charles has decided to respond in a not-so-receptive tone because I
use RAR in my CygWIN scripts, and Charles 
        (apparently) feels that using NON-CygWIN-distributed tools in CygWIN
should not be allowed.
      I choose to use cygwin scripts MANY times to select the files to be
processed, and then pass the list to
        non-CygWIN commands in CygWIN scripts.  I guess I'm an evil person.
      I also dual-boot Windows AND Linux.  I guess that I'm the most evil
person in the world, now.
      Having used CygWIN for years to do file selection for Windows
(mostly), I've now effectively been called an 
        evil person for using DOS and Windows command-line utilities from my
~/bin directory.
      Please excuse the following post to the list, as I use CygWIN under
Windows... as (I believe) it was intended.
  
Charles:
I will try to be polite and calm in my response.

> Did I mention that RAR code CANNOT be linked against the cygwin DLL, nor
distributed by us, because of licensing conflicts?
Thank you.  Didn't know that.  Don't know why it matters.  CygWIN can't
start without Windows, so I fell that this is really a mute point.  ANY DOS
or Windows tool can execute from ~/bin/ (or any CygWIN compliant location)
_AS_IF_ it were a CygWIN-compliant compiled/made tool.  If Windows/CygWIN
isn't enough, one can always Dual-Boot an actual Linux partition, and
configure access to ANY of the Windows partitions, since both Windows and
Linux OSs support FAT, FAT32 and NTFS, and can have complete access from
each OS. CygWIN has to rely on WINDOWS for access to all devices (which
includes drives, partitions, and directory tables).

Because CygWIN runs on top of an actual OS, sometimes the lines get blurry
for many users.
As a user of CygWIN (under Windows) for almost 10 years, the way that I
understand the purpose of cygWIN is that cygWIN is a Windows tool that
exists to add a *nix sub-environment command/shell processor to Windows.
There are versions of Tcsh, Ksh and amny other Unix shells for Windows that
don't require CygWIN.  CygWIN is not a full-fledged OS, thus CygWin still
requires an actual working installation of a complete Windows OS (which is
more and more *nix-like, yet still owned/patrolled by M$ anyway) to execute
CygWIN.  Since CygWIN only runs under Windows, it requires an M$ product,
the Windows OS, to be installed.

CygWIN can start Windows and DOS programs from scripts, which is how I use
CygWIN for the most part.

> nor distributed by us...
Hmmm... I guess (in your vision) OpenSource has no purpose in CygWIN... I
guess that's an opinion... Rather narrow, but it's an opinion.
I point out twice when I've been impatient with what CygWIN supports, and
taken successful steps to upgrade my CygWIN installation in order for CygWIN
to have access to things outside of the CygWIN repos --
A) I have compiled more recent GnuPG version 1.4.8 and 1.4.9 under cygwin,
because I wanted to retain complete compatibility with the files that the
computer's OS (Windows/Linux) creates... and since (at the time) cygwin
hadn't gotten around to adding the latest versions of OpenSource tools to
the CygWIN repo yet. 
B) I have placed DOSRAR in ~/bin before, and used it in CygWIN scripts.

I also wonder why you feel that anything that runs under CygWIN must be
distributed by CygWIN.  By extension of this idea, Do you also believe that
CygWIN "owns" all of the CygWIN scripts that I write, that parse my Windows
directories and log selected WINDOWS files that I use with OpenSource
utilities that run under Windows (the same operating system that CygWIN
couldn't execute without).

Since a user of CygWIN is already using Windows, why are you apparently so
negative of Windows-supported-tools that CygWIN can use almost natively in
it's scripts?

As a Windows/Linux user who uses CygWIN to bring sanity to Windows
scripting, I write scripts in CygWIN to do what Windows decided 
to make difficult.  If I don't want to use CygWIN (or CygWIN does what I
want incorrectly), then I go back to GRUB and choose Ubuntu LINUX or
Mandrake LINUX, and perform the tasks that cygwin mimics under Windows in an
ACTUAL Linux OS installation.

> that RAR code CANNOT be linked against the cygwin DLL...
Actually, you don't have link against the CygWIN DLL, since you're already
running the WINDOWS Operating System.  I copy DOS and Windows commandline
tools to my CygWIN ~/bin all of the time, mark then as executable to CygWIN,
and they work perfectly when called from CygWIN shell scripts.  I take care
to provide DOS/Windows file references to the execution of the DOS/Windows
commands from the Csh or Ksh scripts, and the DOS/Windows commands work
transparently in CygWIN (well, Windows) when called by CygWIN scripts.

Yes, I agree that it IS important to point out on-list that you cannot
compile/build RAR under CygWIN.  It is also valid to point out that there
exists a DOSRAR tool, as well as a Windows commandline RAR.exe which can be
copied into the CygWIN structure, chmod'd -x (or executable), and used as if
it were compiled/built/native to CygWIN.

Peace,

Barry Smith
-----Original Message-----
From: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com [mailto:cygwin-owner@cygwin.com] On Behalf Of
Charles Wilson
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 8:58 PM
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Problem to open big selfextracting Zip files from bash

Barry Smith at SourceLink wrote:
> [snip text extolling how wonderful and great the patent-protected, 
> non-GPL-compatible, free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-speech for 
> DEcompression, and not-free-in-any-way for compression, the RAR format 
> and code is.]

Did I mention that RAR code CANNOT be linked against the cygwin DLL, nor
distributed by us, because of licensing conflicts?

--
Chuck


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


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


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]