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Adding MSYS functionality to Cygwin


Hi everybody!

I want to add MSYS functionality to Cygwin.
More than 10 years ago Cygwin 1.3 had forked to MSYS. But now this
MSYS is very old and don't has any support for it.
Primary goal of MSYS is to provide environment with GNU utilities for
building application using native Mingw compilers. The main
differences from original Cygwin is working with native Win32
applications.
So I create new MSYS based on last Cygwin and it works good I think.
But I think that the right way is to implement MSYS functionality in
Cygwin sources directly because in this case we don't need to do many
copies of different Cygwin dll with other names. And we always has
latest work from Cygwin guys.

I can write next tasks that need to be in MSYS mode:

1. The correct definition of executables belonging to Cygwin DLL.
2. Translating paths in arguments and environment variables to Windows
form for pure Win32 applications.
3. In MSYS mode Cygwin need to be very portable: do not use registry
to store any info, do not use /etc/passwd and /etc/group, all mount
points need to be with noacl option to avoid problems with permission
denied.
4. Ability to change OSNAME that controlled by uname function in Cygwin DLL.
5. Use shorted mount point options in /etc/fstab - only win32_path and
posix_path.
6. SYMLINKS. Now Cygwin can work with native symlinks but it cannot be
used in all situations. From the other side - Win32 applications
doesn't understand Cygwin symlinks. As fallback option we need to
create copies of files and directories instead symlinks.

I want to hear your opinions about how it can be implemented in Cygwin codebase.

Regards,
Alexey.

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