Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ralph Lange <[email protected]> · Thu, 30 Apr 2015 11:29:05 +0200

Sorry if I was not detailed enough.

Yes, Nick is right, this is about dropping support for the Cygwin

run-time environment as a target arch.

EPICS Base on Cygwin has serious performance issues, every once in a

while the compilation breaks because Cygwin seems to change DLL handling

specifics, and - worse - their changing socket implementation needs

regular updating in the EPICS operating system abstraction OSI layer.

For many of the nice GNU tools, the mingw project [1] provides native

solutions that do not depend on a specific run-time library.

EPICS Base switched from cygnus-make to mingw-make a long time ago and

fully supports the mingw on Windows target (creating native Windows

binaries). (Which work nicely when cross-compiled on a Linux host, btw.)

Cheers,
~Ralph

[1] www.mingw.org

On 30/04/2015 10:41, [email protected] wrote:

Hi Torsten,

You have to distinguish between the Cygwin tools, that many find useful, and the Cygwin compile-time environment. I think Ralph is saying is to drop support for the Cygwin gcc compile environment, and require use of the Microsoft compiler. Thus the executables don't depend on the Cygwin run-time environment, which is a moving target.

As an example of the mixture you can still end up with, I know for a long time we depended on a Cygwin version of gmake, but the compiler was still the Windows compiler.

Cheers,

Nick Rees
Principal Software Engineer           Phone: +44 (0)1235-778430
Diamond Light Source                  Fax:   +44 (0)1235-446713

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Torsten Bögershausen
Sent: 30 April 2015 09:33
To: Ralph Lange; EPICS Core-Talk
Subject: Re: Cygnus support

Hej,

  From my experience cygwin has some advantages over native Windows,
like scripts, Perl, POSIX path names, long path names, xemacs..

Are there any chances to give us an overview, which problems, troubles, .. ?

That could ease the motivation for a decision, whichever that would be.

/Torsten

On 30/04/15 10:02, Ralph Lange wrote:

Hm .... here's a proposal:

As supporting the Cygnus/Windows target architecture causes never-ending
trouble and uses significantly more than average resources, I would propose
attempting to drop cygwin support from EPICS Base.

We have well-working support for Linux and native Windows, and IMHO cygwin was
after all a bridge solution until virtualization arrived on the Windows
platform. It seems not just being a moving target, but the wrong target in the
end.

Should we send out a message on tech-talk, asking if there are actually any
EPICS on Cygwin users left?

Cheers,
~Ralph

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System