Re: contribution soapbox(was Re: G++ guru's please comment - Re: FW: pthread_create problem in Cygwin 1.1.8-2])

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 10:36:40PM +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
>Rene, this isn't pointed at you! I just reread my reply and I realised
>I'd missed an IMO important point.
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "René Møller Fonseca" <fonseca@mip.sdu.dk>
>
>
>> Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>>
>>The problem, as I understand it, is that gcc is not built with thread
>>support which is required for exception handling to work in a
>>multithreaded environment.  Unfortunately the thread support has not
>>been ported to the win32 api.  I suspect functionality like
>>"pthread_once" to be required (tricky to implement).
>
>Guys, Girls, secret service agents,
>
>Contributing to cygwin is not hard. In fact it's dead easy. The biggest
>obstacle is perception. All you need are basic C++ (even straight C will
>do if you're a hacker or just willing to try new things) skills, and a
>small target.

Thank you, agent Collins.

You are right that this all should be fairly easy.  What seems to be a big
obstacle for people who are building Cygwin for the first time is the whole
issue of setting up a build environment.

What I usually see is that people download only the cygwin sources and then
discover that they need more than that.  Or, that they try to build cygwin
without configuring first or that they configure in the same directory as
the sources.

In short, it seems like many people who take the plunge are very new to the
wonderful world of GNU programming.  These are issues that anyone who builds
any of the GNU development tools on any platform has to stumble over but
somehow the obstacles seem to be bigger for Cygwin.

The FAQ has information on building: http://cygwin.com/faq/faq_4.html#SEC88.
I'm sure that David Starks would accept additional words to make things
clearer if people are having problems.

I suspect that most of the problems that people have come from not first
checking with the web site for help.  So, I'd advise people to do that first
and then provide feedback if something is unclear or missing.

cgf

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