On 2010/01/09 2:09 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote: > On Jan 8 17:28, Steven Monai wrote: >> Not to beat a dead hippo here, but if Cygwin allows in-use files to be >> replaced, then what is 'setup.exe' needed for? (Aside from the initial >> bootstrap of Cygwin, of course.) Shouldn't it be possible to have proper >> package management---like dpkg, apt, rpm, yum, etc---from within Cygwin now? > > The most pressing problem is the replacement of the cygwin DLL itself. > It's like installing a new kernel in Linux. However, in Linux you have > to reboot to use the new kernel, while Cygwin is just a DLL. After the > rename and replace operation, existing processes will use the old DLL > while new processes will use the new DLL. This is bound to break and > there's no clean way to do it, except to replace the Cygwin DLL while no > other Cygwin process is running.
Could a Cygwin-specific package manager treat the cygwin DLL as a special case? Instead of immediately replacing the cygwin DLL file (as it would normally do for any other DLL), the package manager could use the Windows "schedule-a-delete/rename-on-reboot" facility to arrange for the DLL's replacement at the next reboot. Thus there would never be more than one version of the cygwin DLL loaded at any given time. -SM -- -- 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
