Bug 24018 which appears to be a showstopper for running Cygwin on Wine

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2013-07-01 20:08-0700 Austin English wrote:

> In other words, while fixing Cygwin issues is a valuable effort, it
> takes a lot of time and effort that is better spent elsewhere.

Hi Austin:

I agree that fixing Cygwin on Wine issues will take some considerable
initial effort learning about Cygwin, but after some Wine developer
has made that effort (or if they already have that Cygwin expertise),
then in addition they have complete access to the Cygwin source code
for the Windows calls that are not properly working on Wine, and that
is a big advantage in knocking off Wine problems one by one that are
turned up this way. And I want to emphasize again that fixing those
Wine problems should be a big advantage for _all_ Windows applications
being run on Wine, not just Cygwin.

> [...] [A]sking
> others to spend their time to debug issues that fix Cygwin isn't
> likely to find many volunteers.

Well, there is at least one volunteer working on this, and he has made
some good progress.  Andrey Turkin's small patch for Wine (see his
attachment at <http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24018>) combined
with the Cygwin fork fix now works for him and me in the sense that
the postinstall scripts now all run without catastrophic runtime
errors or hangs. I have added all the details about my experience with
that breakthrough to that bug report.  I have included an attachment
there of a script to allow convenient updating of cygwin1.dll with the
fork-fixed version.

Note, the first postinstall script that is run creates an empty
/etc/fstab rather than the desired result and also fails to create
/dev.  These errors very likely create problems for the other
postinstall scripts and might be some/all of the reason why four of
those scripts generate error messages and have non-zero return codes.

So the status right now is that the postinstall scripts run by
setup.exe on Wine still do not give clean results, but the results are
much better than before the Cygwin fork fix and Andrey's patch. There
are probably a couple of Wine bugs that still need to be fixed before
clean postinstall script results can be achieved.  Of course, a clean
result from the postinstall stage of setup.exe would only be the first
step, but that step should give solid footing for finding and fixing
the rest of the Cygwin on Wine bugs.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________