Re: Question re: GNU coreutils for Windows

[Eric Blake]

On 03/25/2015 08:40 AM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:

> I don't think using non-statically linked binaries is a good idea,
> because of the dependency to that cygwin1.dll: if there's any other
> such binary on the system which depends on another version of that DLL,
> then your program won't start: AFAIR there can only be one cygwin1.dll
> loaded at a time.

That is no longer true.  Upstream cygwin has made it so that properly
partitioned installations can be run in parallel with different versions
of cygwin1.dll.  Meanwhile, cygwin maintains backwards compatibility, so
apps compiled against an older cygwin1.dll will still run if you update
your one copy of cygwin1.dll to a newer version.  And I still maintain
that using the cygwin distro proper is often the easiest way to get
access to a full suite of programs.

> 
>> if you want native applications statically linked, use
>> mingw binaries (easiest when using the pre-compiled binaries from the
>> MSYS distribution, but fewer applications available).
> 
> Do you mean the ones from here?
>   http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS/Base/coreutils/
> There's 5.93 only ... and they depend on 'msys-1.0.dll'.

I don't use msys, so it's news to me that they have started requiring a
dll.  Actually, I think msys is a fork of cygwin designed to make
compiling mingw apps easier; but that it is itself a cygwin-style
distribution (the pre-built binaries depend on the forked dll), and
different than finding mingw binaries that don't depend on a dll.

> 
> AFAIK the best bet on Windows - when you want/have to avoid a complete
> cygwin environment because you only need a few utils like md5sum.exe
> - is still: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

That site is not very active or up-to-date; but yes, it serves the job
of providing some (older) ports of programs that don't change very
frequently and don't need to depend on a dll.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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