0.7.1: Bugfix Release

Paul Sokolovsky — Fri, 03 Aug 2001 20:37:27 -0000

PW32 0.7.1 has been released, as a bugfix release for 0.7.0. It appeared that 0.7.0 was released with broken pw32 dll, not suitable for running any 0.7 package. Unfortunately, it took some time to figure out the bug and release this new version, because I had correct development build installed locally and because I spent most part of summer studying and on vacation in the other city. I apologize to all users who mailed me and who didn't get response in time. Newly released version fixes this bug and also includes the core dll from 0.6 version, to ease installing and usage of PW32, as not all packages were upgraded for 0.7 yet.

Please read original 0.7.0 announcement, http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=85331 for more info on PW32.

PW32 0.7.0 released

Paul Sokolovsky — Fri, 11 May 2001 21:11:19 -0000

New stable release of PW32, almost a year after previous release, is available.

PW32 is a library (compatibility layer) which offers POSIX interface on top of OSes of Win32 family (both Win9x and NT/2000). Unlike other porting layers available, PW32 was specifically designed with efficiency in mind and distributed under the terms of LGPL. Comprehensive set of GNU software packages built with PW32 also provided.

Release 0.7.0 contains many bugfixes and small feature additions since previous release. Among major additions is socket subsystem (Amanda backup client suite was ported with new version of PW32, http://sourceforge.net/projects/pw32/\).

To ease upgrade from previous version, core DLL of PW32, pw32.dll, now comes with version stamp. It means that new packages can now coexisted with ones belonging to the previous version. Until all packages will be upgraded for 0.7.0, it is recommended to have version 0.6.0 of pw32-core package installed (note: it should be installed *before* 0.7.0 version of that package).

Socket subsystem is under development

Paul Sokolovsky — Mon, 19 Feb 2001 21:40:39 -0000

For the need of Amanda-win32 project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda-win32/), socket subsystem is under development for some time now. I just finished successful build of wget, and moving on with cleaning it. It should be available in the next release, which likely to appear soon.

PW32 assigned GNU architecture triplet

Paul Sokolovsky — Tue, 14 Nov 2000 22:22:10 -0000

PW32 has been assigned official GNU target alias, it is 'pw32' and triplet - it is 'i386-unknown-pw32'. New config.guess and config.sub files have it included.

ash is updated, but deprecated

Paul Sokolovsky — Wed, 09 Aug 2000 13:18:21 -0000

It is big surprise for me that people use ash when there's bash available! I even lagged with updating ash for 0.6.0, but download counts of previous version consistently increased. %)

So, I have updated ash, but would like to make it clear: ash is NOT recommended to be used as script interpreter shell. Just to tell a story, ash was first program ported for PW32, just because sh is an important utility and I thought porting ash would be much easier than bloated bash. Now, looking back, I may say I was wrong. Ash is amazing example of classic "Unix" (versus POSIX) app - it is written to exploit knowledge of particular sustems' design traits, instead of using portable typedefs and macros. So its porting wasn't easy. But of course, it was a wonderful testbed for PW32!

After ash was ported, I used it as the default shell (i.e. /bin/sh) without much problems (autoconf testsuite was one I remember), until I started working with libtool. There, I fixed 2 segfault-causing bugs in ash, and when I faced third, I decided not try to fix it, nor even port newer version of it, but invest time into porting bash. There were some little problems with it (and still one remained - bash doesn't eat dos textfiles yet), but it works fine now.

On Linux, ash is most used for rescue disks. So, if you want to make diskette to carry along to have POSIX environment on any win32 box you can pass by, ash is your choice ;-). Otherwise, use bash!

PW32 milestone: self-sufficient developmental GNU/Win32 dist

Paul Sokolovsky — Tue, 08 Aug 2000 17:48:47 -0000

PW32, an efficient POSIX subset implementation atop of Win32 API with its 0.6.0 release has reached status of GNU/Win32 distribution containing all common tools required for C application development/porting.

PW32 is an implementation of the (subset of) POSIX/Unix API for Win32
systems. Its main concerns are efficiency and full platform coverage,
including adequate support for low-end Win9x systems. PW32 is based
on DJGPP's runtime library by DJ Delorie. PW32 core is licensed under LGPL.

Also, PW32 is a collection of ported software. There's a simple packaging scheme employed, allowing installing to be as easy as manual unpacking zip archive (in fact, no package manager exists yet). As of release 0.6.0, more than 20 packages are available, from fileutils to libtool - in short, everything needed to do Free- and OpenSource development in canonical GNU way on the Win32 platforms.

More information is available at http://pw32.sourceforge.net

[SourceForge] One-step Trove querying

Paul Sokolovsky — Mon, 17 Jul 2000 12:17:43 -0000

The Trove categorizing scheme, adopted by SourceForge, is very powerful device and indeed big leap forward comparing to classical Freshmeat/RPM categorization. However, to use its full power, sophisticated, but interface-easy searching/querying solution should exist. Current approach - incrementally putting constraints may be ok for browsing, but gets too cumbersome when you want to do plain searching. So, as an experiment, I made alternative interface to SF Trove engine, which uses standard for multi-category databases technique: presents entire category tree and allows user to select required criteria on it. Unfortunately, I must admit that it didn't work as well as I expected: even with not fully traversed category tree it's quite big and selecting criteria on it is quite distracting. Traditionally, this problem solved by collapsable tree widgets, but it's not so easy to do it in web.

Anyway, you can see what's it all about at http://pw32.sourceforge.net/sf/trove-tree.php3 . Comments are welcome.

New package: automake

Paul Sokolovsky — Sun, 16 Jul 2000 13:18:50 -0000

This is release is based on automake snapshot from official CVS repository. As recommended, please do not redistribute this snapshot widely (since it may contain bugs) and be prepared to them yourself. Having said that, CVS automake has many nice things that were not available before.

New package: perl-bin

Paul Sokolovsky — Sun, 16 Jul 2000 13:08:04 -0000

Yes, the great Perl, is finally here. Version 5.005_03, I didn't dare to touch 5.6 yet. Well, it's enough to run automake.

New package: which-bin

Paul Sokolovsky — Sun, 16 Jul 2000 13:04:07 -0000

GNU which, utility to find full path of the executable, available at version 2.11.

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