On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 07:48:24AM -0800, Brian Dessent wrote: >Christopher Faylor wrote: > >> >FWIW, this idea of creating a mingw "libcygpath" really appeals to me >> >and it's been an idea I've been meaning to look at for a while. It >> >would be a library that knows how to read the mount table, and do basic >> >path conversions, without depending on cygwin1.dll. Then cygpath and >> >setup.exe could both statically link to this library, and it would be >> >available to other users as well. >> >> FWIW, Robert Collins and I talked about doing this years ago but it just >> suffered due to SHTDI. I think that path.cc in the utils directory >> should be a pretty good start towards a library for reading the mount >> table. It is what is used by strace.cc and cygcheck.cc. > >I've been thinking about this a little more. > >The way I see it, in a perfect world, this library would be BSD/MIT >licensed, or at the very least LGPL, so that "foreign" programs by 3PPs >could use it unencumbered, so that they can function better with Cygwin. > >However, winsup/utils/path.cc is under the Cygwin license. I don't >suppose there is any chance of getting Redhet to relicense parts of the >utils directory? It seems small enough that it could be reimplemented >without a lot of hassle, but it's still extra work.
I think there is very small chance of that. IIRC, some of that code is straight out of the cygwin DLL itself. I think that anyone who had studied the cygwin path handling code would have a tough time proving that there was no "taintedness" if they tried to produce a library under a different license. cgf -- 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/