Hi guys,
Yaakov brought this up in a private IRC conversation a couple of weeks ago, but I dismissed it at the time. But I guess we have to discuss this. Consider somebody has 32 and 64 bit Cygwin installed in parallel. At least for developers and package maintainers this won't be that uncommon. Now, they will run in parallel just fine, and most of our packages don't do anything outside of the cygwin installation dir. However, there are a couple of packages which change the system on a global basis. I see three groups here: 1. Packages installing shortcuts in the start menu and/or desktop (this includes setup itself). #1 types could be solved rather easily if we attach a "64" to all the created shortcuts. But do we really want that, considering a setup for a "normal" user with only a single installation? What are the trade-offs? 2. Packages installing services. #2 packages have a service name collision. Obviously you can't install two services called "cron". Should the package install its service under another name, again by just attaching a "64" to the service name? This would require to change the service installer scripts to check on what platform they are running and then attaching the "64" suffix if `uname -m' returns "x86_64". An alternative would be to change cygrunsrv so that the 64 bit version always attaches the "64" automatically. While this is easy to accomplish, I see a problem here because the name change is not transparent to the user, nor to scripts. Having said that, the name change from "cron" to "cron64" is also kind of cumbersome. Usually you only need one service, either the 32 or the 64 bit version, but not both. So, do we want the name change at all? But what about cygserver? Without cygserver there's no XSI IPC. Even if we don't change the service names on a general basis, shouldn't cygserver at least be available in parallel, using different service names? 3. Packages installing network services. As for the #3 packages, they collide in another way as well since a service is usually connected with a default port. Sshd is expected on port 22. Telnet on port 23, smtp on port 25, etc. I don't think it would be the right thing to move all 64 bit server to other ports by default. I don't see any satisfactory way to install those services in parallel with a simple installer script, so I would keep this to the knowledgable user. And here it might be even helpful that the service names already collide since it disallows to install two network services Right? Wrong? Neither right nor wrong? Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Maintainer cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Red Hat
