Re: glibc stacking up to Windows

[Dwayne Grant McConnell <decimal at us dot ibm dot com>]

On Mon, 15 May 2006, Michael Lueck wrote:

> Admittedly I am new to developing on Linux, but quickly I come to the
> conclusion that glibc has less functions available that Win32 offers. For
> Linux to have a shot against Windows, is there any serious development going
> on in terms of making glibc par with Win32 in terms of a diverse set of
> functions available?
> 
> Right now I am working in the filesystem area, and I find some major gaps.
> Simple things like it seems there is no glibc equiv for CopyFile(). Why? How
> is a program written in C expected to make a copy of a file on Linux? As well,
> nothing seems to do what GetFullPathName() does on Win32.
> 
> Now, obviously Linux has /bin/cp, which is GPL, so why not pull out the worker
> code of cp and come up with an equiv CopyFile() API... and once it is standard
> enough in glibc releases, point the executable cp to use the API in place of
> having the code directly in that program?

Please go to http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/ and read the History and 
Project Goals sections of the web page. It is not a goal of glibc to 
implement Win32 functions. You will have to look elsewhere for that sort 
of Windows compatibility work on Linux.

-- 
Dwayne Grant McConnell <decimal@us.ibm.com>
Lotus Notes Mail: Dwayne McConnell [Mail]/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
Lotus Notes Calendar: Dwayne McConnell [Calendar]/Austin/IBM@IBMUS