YA call for snapshot testing

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

Corinna and I think that we're coming close to achieving stability for
a new release so we'd like you to try the most recent snapshot at:

http://cygwin.com/snapshots/

Please reports variations from 1.7.9, including "Hey! It's a lot faster
than 1.7.9!" as well as the usual bug reports.

When reporting a problem, if you can provide details which pinpoint where
the problem occurred it would be very helpful.  When reporting problems
think about it as if we don't know exactly what you did or exactly what
went wrong, using the guidelines at http://cygwin.com/problems.html as
a guide.

If you have been trying snapshots all along and can pinpoint where a
problem occurred that is very helpful.  It is barely helpful to report
something like: "I just tried the 2012-01-11 snapshot and "ls" doesn't
work.  It does work in 1.7.9" It is mildly more helpful to report "I
just tried the 2012-01-11 snapshot and "ls" doesn't work.  It does work
in the 2012-07-30 snapshot".  It is incredibly helpful to report: "I
just tried....  I searched through the list of snapshots and found that
it first broke on 2011-08-27".

In all of the scenarios above you would, of course, go into more details
about what "doesn't work" means.

If we don't see any regressions reported we'll likely release a new version
of Cygwin within the next week.

The release announcement for 1.7.10 is below.

Thanks,
cgf

---

What's new:
-----------

- New getconf tool for querying confstr(3), pathconf(3), sysconf(3), and
  limits.h configuration.

- The passwd tool now allows an administrator to use the -R command for
  other user accounts:  passwd -R username.

- Experimental: Change the way sockets are created so that Cygwin always
  circumvents so-called "layered service providers" (LSPs) starting with
  Windows Vista.

- signal handler functions are now dispatched in threads other than the
  main thread.

- Support NcFsd filesystem.

- clock_gettime(3) and clock_getres(3) accept per-process and per-thread
  CPU-time clocks, including CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID and
  CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID.

- New pthread functions:

  - Spin Locks: pthread_spin_destroy, pthread_spin_init, pthread_spin_lock,
    pthread_spin_trylock, pthread_spin_unlock.

  - Stack management: pthread_attr_getstack, pthread_attr_getstackaddr,
    pthread_attr_getguardsize, pthread_attr_setstack, pthread_attr_setstackaddr,
    pthread_attr_setguardsize, pthread_getattr_np.
  
  - Clock Selection: pthread_getcpuclockid, pthread_condattr_getclock,
    pthread_condattr_setclock.

  - Scheduling: pthread_setschedprio.

  - Signalling: pthread_sigqueue.

- Add /proc/devices, /proc/misc, /proc/sysvipc, /proc/swaps.

- Make various system functions thread cancelation points per POSIX.

- Add ioctl FIONREAD handling for non-sockets.

- dlopen now supports the Glibc-specific RTLD_NODELETE and RTLD_NOOPEN flags.

- The printf and wprintf families of functions now support the %m conversion
  flag.

- Execed processes now inherit the children of their predecessor.

- Fifos have been rewritten and should now be more reliable.

- GNU/glibc error.h error reporting functions: error, error_at_line,
  error_message_count, error_one_per_line, error_print_progname.

- C99 <tgmath.h> type-generic macros.

- Other new API: clock_getcpuclockid, clock_nanosleep, clock_settime, __fpurge,
  get_current_dir_name, getgrouplist, getpt, ppoll, psiginfo, psignal,
  ptsname_r, sys_siglist, sysinfo.

- cygwin_conv_path_list finally supports CCP_WIN_W_TO_POSIX and
  CCP_POSIX_TO_WIN_W conversions.


What changed:
-------------

- Drop support for Windows NT4.

- The CYGWIN environment variable options "envcache", "strip_title", "title",
  "tty", and "upcaseenv" have been removed.

- Revamp console and pseudo tty handling.  Rename /dev/ttyX to /dev/consX,
  /dev/ttyX to /dev/ptyX.

- The CYGWIN=tty mode using pipes to communicate with the console in a pseudo
  tty-like mode has been removed.  Either just use the normal Windows console
  as is, or use a terminal application like mintty.

- Improve fork/exec performance on 64 bit systems.

- Improve Ctrl-C handling in console.

- Try harder to let fork not fail if DLLs are moved in memory which should,
  in some cases, minimize the need for rebaseall.

- Try harder to send SIGHUP to children when process group leader fails.

- Deal with Windows problem where non-blocking pipe I/O was not flushed properly
  on close.

- Attempt to regularize most syscall-related strace output.

- Improve behavior of Cygwin when started from a 64-bit process, especially under
  Windows 2003.

- Improve multi-threading safety with syscalls that deal with fds.

- New heap management.  Drop registry setting "heap_chunk_in_mb" in favor of
  a new per-executable setting in the executable file header which can be set
  using the peflags tool.  Drop registry setting "heap_slop_in_mb" entirely.

- dlopen can now find "cygFOO.dll", even if the caller specified "libFOO.so".
  This is supposed to support applications which are no aware of Windows DLLs.

- Make accept(2), poll(2) and shutdown(2) behave more like on Linux.

- Raise max number of mount points from 30 to 64.

- Output of /proc/maps is closer to what Linux prints and much more useful to
  examine process VM layout.

- /proc/loadavg now shows the number of currently running processes and the
  total number of processes.

- /proc/version now shows the username of whomever compiled the Cygwin DLL
  as well as the version of GCC used when compiling.

- cygwin_conv_path and cygwin_conv_path_list: In CCP_WIN_A_TO_POSIX and
  CCP_POSIX_TO_WIN_A conversions, use the current Windows ANSI or OEM
  charset, depending on the return value of AreFileApisANSI.  Up to Cygwin
  1.7.9, both conversions used the current Cygwin charset for the conversion.

- Various assorted bugfixes and improvements.

- Preliminary, no guarantee, may be broken in subtle ways, Windows 8 support.

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple