Re: Mirosoft Interix contains Cygwin

[Mumit Khan <khan at NanoTech dot Wisc dot EDU>]

DJ Delorie <dj@delorie.com> writes:

> Cool!  Now even Microsoft is seeing the benefits of open source software.

Actually, Microsoft always has, just likes to hide the fact in case
it's forced to practice the same! If you look at its own now-obsolete
POSIX kit, it included quite a bit of GNU code, including a port of 
gcc. That whole POSIX subsystem and kit is now obsoleted by Interix's 
product.

As for Interix, here's a bit of history: Softway/Interix a few years 
ago started out with Cygwin b17 as the base and built a version of gcc 
and binutils for their POSIX subsystem. GCC didn't need too much 
modification, at least at the basic level, but binutils is a whole 
different story.

Even though Interix now uses newer gcc, their stable codebase still
uses some old code, and that's why you see the cygnus-2.7.2-970404.

I assume the "assimilation" of Interix by MS will have caused some
temporary glitches, but Interix has always maintained full sources
on their ftp site; a bit buried, but the pointer is on their CD and
in docs.

For the record, I have no affiliation with Interix other than some 
productive collaborative efforts with Donn Terry in porting egcs 
to Interix.

> Plus, the i386-pc-opennt directory means that they *had* to rebuild
> gcc from source, targetting their system.  This means that there are
> now five wintel gccs - emx, djgpp, cygwin, mingw, and now interix.

Make that *six*; a brand new one -- ix86-pc-win32-gnu -- which uses 
GNU C Library as the runtime. I'm still cleaning out bits and pieces
at this point, mostly in the runtime.

Sorry about getting rather off-topic here ...

Regards,
Mumit


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