88 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
88 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
<chapter id="overview"><title>Cygwin Overview</title>
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<sect1 id="what-is-it"><title>What is it?</title>
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<para>The Cygwin tools are ports of the popular GNU development
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tools and utilities for Windows NT and 9x. They function through the
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use of the Cygwin library which provides the UNIX system calls and
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environment that these programs require.</para>
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<para>With the tools installed, programmers may write Win32
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console or GUI applications that make use of the standard Microsoft
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Win32 API and/or the Cygwin API. As a result, it is possible to
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easily port many significant UNIX programs without the need for
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extensive changes to the source code. This includes configuring and
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building most of the available GNU software (including the development
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tools included with the Cygwin distributions). Even if the
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compiler tools are of little to no use to you, you may have
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interest in the many standard UNIX utilities. They can be used both
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from the bash shell (provided) or from the command.com.</para>
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</sect1>
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<sect1 id="are-free"><title>Are the Cygwin tools free software?</title>
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<para>Yes. Parts are GNU software (gcc, gas, ld, etc...), parts are
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covered by the standard X11 license, some of it is public domain,
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some of it was written by Cygnus and placed under the GPL. None of it
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is shareware. You don't have to pay anyone to use it but you should be
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sure to read the copyright section of the FAQ more more information on
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how the GNU General Public License may affect your use of these
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tools. If you intend to port a proprietary application using the Cygwin
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library, you may want the Cygwin proprietary-use license.
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For more information about the
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proprietary-use license, please contact sales@cygnus.com. Customers of
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the native Win32 GNUPro should feel free to submit bug reports and ask
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questions through the normal channels. All other questions should be
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sent to the project mailing list cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com.</para>
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</sect1>
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<sect1 id="brief-history"><title>A brief history of the Cygwin project</title>
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<para>The first thing done was to enhance the development tools (gcc,
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gdb, gas, et al) so that they could generate/interpret Win32 native
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object files.</para>
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<para>The next task was to port the tools to Win NT/9x. We could have
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done this by rewriting large portions of the source to work within the
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context of the Win32 API. But this would have meant spending a huge
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amount of time on each and every tool. Instead, we took a
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substantially different approach by writing a shared library
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(the Cygwin DLL) that adds the necessary UNIX-like functionality
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missing from the Win32 API (fork, spawn, signals, select, sockets,
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etc.). We call this new interface the Cygwin API. Once written, it
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was possible to build working Win32 tools using UNIX-hosted
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cross-compilers, linking against this library.</para>
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<para>From this point, we pursued the goal of producing native tools
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capable of rebuilding themselves under Windows 9x and NT (this is
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often called self-hosting). Since neither OS ships with standard UNIX
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user tools (fileutils, textutils, bash, etc...), we had to get the GNU
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equivalents working with the Cygwin API. Most of these tools were
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previously only built natively so we had to modify their configure
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scripts to be compatible with cross-compilation. Other than the
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configuration changes, very few source-level changes had to be
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made. Running bash with the development tools and user tools in place,
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Windows 9x and NT look like a flavor of UNIX from the perspective of
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the GNU configure mechanism. Self hosting was achieved as of the beta
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17.1 release.</para>
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</sect1>
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-ex-unix
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-ex-win
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<sect1 id="highlights"><title>Highlights of Cygwin Functionality</title>
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-intro
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-win9xnt
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-perm
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-files
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-textvsbinary
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-ansiclib
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-process
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-signals
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-sockets
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DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-select
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</sect1>
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</chapter>
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