Re: Providing support for the Win32 API.

[Carlos O'Donell]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 09:59:53PM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
> address@hidden (Eric Blake) wrote:
> >> Coreutils,
> >>
> >> In the abstract, would the project be interested in patches to make
> >> coreutils *also* work with the Win32 API where possible. Thus making it
> >> possible to target i686-mingw32.
> >
> > The gnulib project already has several things ported to mingw; you will
> > probably have more success by proposing gnulib modules so that coreutils
> > can compile with gnulib and no additional ifdefs, rather than hacking in
> > coreutils directly.
> 
> That's good advice.  However, if you come up with clean patches,
> parts might well be worth integrating directly into coreutils.

That is excellent advice. I had not considered working with the gnulib
project. 

The current set of patches I have make it possible to build a subset of
coreutils for an i686-mingw32 target. Getting all the tools to build
would not be feasible. The patches would have some configury pieces to
select what is possible to build on this target.

In general the changes revolve around:
- Symlink handling.
- lstat vs. stat.
- mkdir without a mode argument.
- No euidaccess checks.

I will probably work on two fronts then, working with gnulib, and
submitting patches here for review.

Thanks for being open minded :)

Cheers,
Carlos.
-- 
Carlos O'Donell
CodeSourcery
address@hidden
(650) 331-3385 x716