newlib-cygwin/winsup/doc/changes.texinfo

@section Release Beta 20.1 (Dec 4 1998)

This is a bug fix update to the Beta 20 release.

The main change is an improved version of the Cygwin library although
there are also a couple of other minor changes to the tools.

@subsection Changes in specific tools:

The "-mno-cygwin" flag to gcc now include the correct headers.  In 20.0,
it included the Cygwin headers which was incorrect.

The "-pipe" flag to gcc works correctly now.

The cygcheck program now reassures users that not finding cpp is the
correct behavior.

The "-b" flag to md5sum can now be used to generate correct checksums
of binary files.

The libtermcap library has been added to the compiler tools sources.
It is the new source of the termcap library and /etc/termcap file.

The less pager (using libtermcap) has been added to the binary
distribution.

@subsection Changes in the Cygwin API (cygwin.dll):

This version of Cygwin is backwards-compatible with the beta 20 and 19
releases.  The library is now much more stable under Windows 9x and the
bugs affecting configures under 9x (and NT to a lesser extent) have
also been fixed.

The bug that made it necessary to start the value of the CYGWIN
environment variable with two leading spaces has been fixed.

The serial support in the select call has been fixed.

Handling of DLLs loaded by non-cygwin apps has been improved.  Bugs in
dlopen have been fixed.

Passing _SC_CHILD_MAX to the sysconf function now yields CHILD_MAX (63)
instead of _POSIX_CHILD_MAX (3).

Several minor path bugs have been fixed.  Including the one that
caused "mkdir a/" to fail.

The include file sys/sysmacros.h has been added.  Added missing protos
for wcslen and wcscmp to wchar.h.

__P is now defined in include/sys/cdefs.h.  To support that last change,
the top-level Makefile.in now sets CC_FOR_TARGET and CXX_FOR_TARGET
differently.

Cygwin now exports the following newlib bessel functions: j1, jn, y1,
yn.

Several tty ioctl options have been added: TCGETA, TCSETA, TCSETAW, and
TCSETAF.

Several functions cope with NULL pointer references more gracefully.

Problems with execution of relative paths via #! should be fixed.

@section Release Beta 20 (Oct 30 1998)

This is a significant update to the Beta 19 release.  In addition to an
EGCS-based compiler and updated tools, this release includes a new
version of the Cygwin library that contains many improvements and
bugfixes over the last one.

@subsection The project has a new name!

Starting with this release, we are retiring the "GNU-Win32" name for the
releases.  We have also dropped the "32" from Cygwin32.  This means that
you should now refer to the tools as "the Cygwin toolset", the library
as "the Cygwin library" or "the Cygwin DLL", and the library's interface
as "the Cygwin API".

Because of this name change, we have changed any aspects of the library
that involved the name "Cygwin32".  For example, the CYGWIN32
environment variable is now the CYGWIN environment variable.  API
functions starting with cygwin32_ are still available under that form
for backwards-compatibility as well as under the new cygwin_-prefixed
names.  The same goes for the change of preprocessor define from
__CYGWIN32__ to __CYGWIN__.  We will remove the old names in a future
release so please take the minute or two that it will take to remove
those "32"s.  Thanks and I apologize for the hassle this may cause
people.  We would have changed the name to "Bob" but that name's already
taken by Microsoft...  :-)

Why change it?  For one thing, not all of the software included in the
distributions is GNU software, including the Cygwin library itself.  So
calling the project "GNU-Win32" has always been a bit of a misnomer.  In
addition, we think that calling the tools the "Cygwin tools" that use
the "Cygwin library" will be less confusing to people.

Also notice that we are now on the spiffy new sourceware.cygnus.com
web/ftp site.  The old address will work for some unknown period of
time (hopefully at least until we get all of the mirrors adjusted).

@subsection Changes in specific tools:

The latest public EGCS release is now the basis for the compiler used
in Cygwin distributions.  As a result, EGCS 1.1 is the compiler in this
release, with a few additional x86/Cygwin-related patches.

Those of you who are more interested in native Windows development than
in porting Unix programs will be glad to know that a new gcc flag
"-mno-cygwin" will link in the latest Mingw32 libs and produce an
executable that does not use Cygwin.

All of the other development tools have been updated to their latest
versions.  The linker (ld) includes many important bug fixes.  It is now
possible to safely strip a DLL with a .reloc section.  The windres
resource compiler is significantly improved.

Beta 20 also includes upgrades to a number of packages: ash-0.3.2-4,
bash 2.02.1, grep-2.2, ncurses 4.2, and less 332.  We have added bzip2
0.9.0 to the distribution.  And you'll now find that the df utility
has joined its other friends from the fileutils package.

The sh executable is still ash from the Debian Linux distribution but no
longer has the problematic quoting bug that was present in the Beta 19
release.  Control-Cs in the bash shell no longer kill background tasks.

Tcl/tk are upgraded to version 8.1a2 (with additional patches).
Compatible versions of tix and itcl are included.  These all include
Cygwin-compatible configury files so you can do a Unix-style build of
the Win32 ports of tcl/tk.  expect has been upgraded to 5.26 with some
additional Cygwin patches.

In response to customer requests and feedback, Cygnus has developed a
better graphical front end to GDB than GDBtk or WinGDB.  This tcl-based
GUI is shipping today to customers of the GNUPro Toolkit.  The
instrumentation changes to GDB and the tcl interpreter that was built
into GDB are part of the GPL'd source base.  But the tcl scripts are not
being made available to the net at this time.  For this reason, you will
only find a command-line version of gdb in this Cygwin release.

DJ Delorie has written a new "cygcheck" program that will print out
useful information about how your Cygwin environment is set up, what
DLLs a named executable is loading from where, etc.  We hope this will
make it easier to help diagnose common setup problems.

The ps utility has been upgraded.  It now has several options including
shorter and longer output formats.

@subsection Changes in the Cygwin API (cygwin.dll):

This version of Cygwin is backwards-compatible with the beta 19 release.
You can use the new "cygwin1.dll" with your old B19-compiled executables
if you move the old "cygwinb19.dll" out of the way and install a copy
of "cygwin1.dll" as "cygwinb19.dll".

Quite a lot of the Cygwin internals have been rewritten or modified to
address various issues.  If you have a question about specific changes,
the winsup/ChangeLog file in the development tools sources lists all
changes made to the DLL over the last three years.  Following are a few
highlights:

We are now using a new versioning scheme for Cygwin.  There is now a
separate version number for the DLL, the API, the shared memory region
interfaces, and the registry interface.  This will hopefully make it
easier for multiple Cygwin toolsets to coexist in one user environment.

Windows 98 is now supported (it is like Windows 95 from Cygwin's
perspective).  We still recommend upgrading to Windows NT.

While there is still a lot left to do in improving Cygwin's runtime
performance, we have put some effort into this prior to the B20 release.
Hopefully you will find that the latest version of Cygwin is faster than
ever.  In addition, we have plugged several nasty handle leaks
associated with opening/closing files and with using ttys.

The lseek call now uses WriteFile to fill gaps with zeros whenever a
write is done past an EOF, rather than leaving "undefined" data as Win32
specifies.

Significant work has been done to improve the Cygwin header files.

The Cygwin Support for Unix-style serial I/O is much improved.

Path handling has had another round of fixes/rewrites.  We no longer use
NT Extended Attributes by default for storing Unix permissions/execute
status because the file NT creates on FAT partitions is not scalable to
thousands of files (everything slows to a crawl).

Signal handling has also gotten a fair amount of attention.
Unfortunately, there are still some problems combining itimers and
Windows 9x.

The number of ttys has been upped from 16 to 128.

New API calls included in the DLL: sethostent, endhostent.

As mentioned earlier, all cygwin32_-prefixed functions are now exported
with a cygwin_ prefix instead.  Please adjust your code to call the
newly named functions.

reads of `slow' devices are now correctly interrupted by signals, i.e.
a read will receive an EINTR.