Hi,

For several years, some of Freepascal utilities always cause troubles from cygwin version conflict with my machine main cygwin installation. I believe Freepascal package will be a lot more integrated if those cygwin utilities can be replace with FPC-based solution. Have this idea been considered before ?
How much effort to accomplish that ? Should I try to do that myself ?

> Is it possible to remove dependency on cygwin from freepascal ?

To make it clear, I actually mean "remove dependency on some cygwin utilities" Fpc compiler is not based on cygwin, however.

Sorry if this could cause some confusion to some new freepascal user.

As far as I know, the most prominent place causing cygwin dependency on Win32 is the GDB debugger (and its library form used by FP IDE). Possibility of own debugger was discussed here repeatedly, but it's a rather complex area.

Tomas

The stand-alone debugger gdb distributed with fpc is not cygwin, but mingw32.

Vincent

Op Tue, 28 Apr 2009, schreef Vincent Snijders:

Did someone ever try to build a libgdb under mingw32?

Daniël

In our previous episode, sakesun roykiatisak said:

Afaik only GDB (both cmdline as in the textmode IDE) require cygwin. If these could be replaced with mingw versions, it would be cygwin-less. This can be seen below:

C:\FPC\2.2.4\bin\i386-win32>grep -i cygwin *
Binary file cygiconv-2.dll matches
Binary file cygncurses-8.dll matches
Binary file cygwin1.dll matches
Binary file fp.exe matches
Binary file gdb.exe matches

Mario Mahardhika already tried to do this, and put his experiences in the following bugreport:

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=11968

what needs to be done now is duplicate and evaluate this option, since one of the reasons fpc currently uses 6.2.1 is because that version was known to work the best. (afaik up to 6.4 has been tried).

In our previous episode, Vincent Snijders said:

> As far as I know, the most prominent place causing cygwin dependency on > Win32 is the GDB debugger (and its library form used by FP IDE). The stand-alone debugger gdb distributed with fpc is not cygwin, but mingw32.

The 2.2.4 gdb.exe greps on cygwin. It might be workarounds for debugging cygwin programs though, since looking with pe-explorer doesn't show gdb.exe statically linking to cygwin.

Interesting.I have :
D:\FPC\2.3.2\bin\i386-win32>fpc -i
Free Pascal Compiler version 2.3.1

Compiler Date : 2009/04/27
Compiler CPU Target: i386

and:
D:\FPC\2.3.2\bin\i386-win32>grep -i cygwin *
Binary file cygiconv-2.dll matches
Binary file cygncurses-8.dll matches
Binary file cygwin1.dll matches
Binary file gdb.exe matches

Only gdb.exe need replacement ?

Regards
Boguslaw

In our previous episode, Bogusław Brandys said:

The IDE can be compiled with and without gdb. Releases typically have GDB, snapshots not.

oops,sorry. That was my mistake. I always make new snapshot from SVN and copy missing files from last release (which is used to compile SVN trunk version). So I guess there is no dependency on cygwin in SVN version ! Great ! The listed gdb.exe is really mingw32 based, I don't know why cygwin is an dependency here, but I moved cygwn libs to other diectory and gdb still works.

Boguslaw.

... but not the debugger integrated into the text mode IDE ;)

Yes, there is even a bug report discussing it (it doesn't work).

In our previous episode, Florian Klaempfl said:

Btw, Florian, do you remember the reasons why we still ship 6.2.1 ? What exactly doesn't work with newer ones?

In our previous episode, Florian Klaempfl said:

(I quickly tried to duplicate that last weekend, but kept running into missing sys/ipc.h, even with mingw patches applied. I didn't have time to further look into this. Probably will have to subscribe to mingw list to ask a bunch of questions about it I assume)

Debugging ;)? Nobody tested and provided newer versions yet.