diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'winsup/doc/overview.sgml')
-rw-r--r-- | winsup/doc/overview.sgml | 87 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 87 deletions
diff --git a/winsup/doc/overview.sgml b/winsup/doc/overview.sgml deleted file mode 100644 index 4b48094..0000000 --- a/winsup/doc/overview.sgml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,87 +0,0 @@ -<chapter id="overview"><title>Cygwin Overview</title> - -<sect1 id="what-is-it"><title>What is it?</title> - -<para>The Cygwin tools are ports of the popular GNU development -tools and utilities for Windows NT and 9x. They function through the -use of the Cygwin library which provides the UNIX system calls and -environment that these programs require.</para> - -<para>With the tools installed, programmers may write Win32 -console or GUI applications that make use of the standard Microsoft -Win32 API and/or the Cygwin API. As a result, it is possible to -easily port many significant UNIX programs without the need for -extensive changes to the source code. This includes configuring and -building most of the available GNU software (including the development -tools included with the Cygwin distributions). Even if the -compiler tools are of little to no use to you, you may have -interest in the many standard UNIX utilities. They can be used both -from the bash shell (provided) or from the command.com.</para> - -</sect1> - -<sect1 id="are-free"><title>Are the Cygwin tools free software?</title> - -<para>Yes. Parts are GNU software (gcc, gas, ld, etc...), parts are -covered by the standard X11 license, some of it is public domain, -some of it was written by Cygnus and placed under the GPL. None of it -is shareware. You don't have to pay anyone to use it but you should be -sure to read the copyright section of the FAQ more more information on -how the GNU General Public License may affect your use of these -tools. If you intend to port a proprietary application using the Cygwin -library, you may want the Cygwin proprietary-use license. -For more information about the -proprietary-use license, please contact sales@cygnus.com. Customers of -the native Win32 GNUPro should feel free to submit bug reports and ask -questions through the normal channels. All other questions should be -sent to the project mailing list cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com.</para> - -</sect1> - -<sect1 id="brief-history"><title>A brief history of the Cygwin project</title> - -<para>The first thing done was to enhance the development tools (gcc, -gdb, gas, et al) so that they could generate/interpret Win32 native -object files.</para> - -<para>The next task was to port the tools to Win NT/9x. We could have -done this by rewriting large portions of the source to work within the -context of the Win32 API. But this would have meant spending a huge -amount of time on each and every tool. Instead, we took a -substantially different approach by writing a shared library -(the Cygwin DLL) that adds the necessary UNIX-like functionality -missing from the Win32 API (fork, spawn, signals, select, sockets, -etc.). We call this new interface the Cygwin API. Once written, it -was possible to build working Win32 tools using UNIX-hosted -cross-compilers, linking against this library.</para> - -<para>From this point, we pursued the goal of producing native tools -capable of rebuilding themselves under Windows 9x and NT (this is -often called self-hosting). Since neither OS ships with standard UNIX -user tools (fileutils, textutils, bash, etc...), we had to get the GNU -equivalents working with the Cygwin API. Most of these tools were -previously only built natively so we had to modify their configure -scripts to be compatible with cross-compilation. Other than the -configuration changes, very few source-level changes had to be -made. Running bash with the development tools and user tools in place, -Windows 9x and NT look like a flavor of UNIX from the perspective of -the GNU configure mechanism. Self hosting was achieved as of the beta -17.1 release.</para> - -</sect1> - -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-ex-unix -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-ex-win -<sect1 id="highlights"><title>Highlights of Cygwin Functionality</title> -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-intro -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-win9xnt -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-perm -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-files -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-textvsbinary -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-ansiclib -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-process -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-signals -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-sockets -DOCTOOL-INSERT-ov-hi-select -</sect1> -</chapter> |