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Delete entry "Ancient history of the project", replace with link to history.html.

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David Starks-Browning 2000-10-18 11:52:15 +00:00
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@ -122,37 +122,6 @@ latest version. The Cygwin team frequently updates and adds new
packages to the soureware web site. The setup.exe program is the
easiest way to determine what you need on your system.
@section Ancient history of the project
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.
The next task was to port the tools to Win NT/95. 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 (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.
From this point, we pursued the goal of producing native tools capable of
rebuilding themselves under Windows 95 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 95 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.
After adding Windows 98 support to Cygwin in mid-1998, we added support
for the native Microsoft libraries in the compiler which allows
compilation of executables that do not use Cygwin. This is important to
those people who want to use the tools to develop Win32 applications
that do not need the UNIX emulation layer.
For some "ancient" history of the project (rather, just woefully out of
date), visit the Project History page at
@file{http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/history.html}.