Some beta 18 details

[Geoffrey Noer <noer at cygnus dot com>]

> By chance, is there a list of new functionality/features for this upcoming
> release?

Well, I'll take a stab at it but some of this is *tentative* as is the
release date of late April/early May.  A fair number of the improvements
are due to net contributions made since the last release and they are very
much appreciated.

Regards,

Geoffrey Noer
noer@cygnus.com


Beta 18: changes in specific tools:
-----------------------------------

GCC compilation times have been improved by 20-30% by using spawn()
instead of fork().

GCC now accepts both Win32 and POSIX paths/path lists in its
environment variables (COMPILER_PATH, LIBRARY_PATH, C_INCLUDE_PATH,
CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH, OBJC_INCLUDE_PATH)

Make has been upgraded to version 3.75.  Make accepts both Win32 and POSIX
path lists in the VPATH variable.

Time has been upgraded to version 1.7.

Beta 18: changes in the Cygwin32 API (cygwin.dll):
--------------------------------------------------

The following is now supported:

* UNC paths
* Reverse index escapes in console code
* Blocking select()s on a combination of sockets/handles
* Directory symlinks.
* Reparenting of child processes.

The following calls have been added:

* mmap(), mprotect(), msync(), munmap().  fork() changed to support these.
* statfs(), fstatfs(), fsync().
* getprotobynumber() and getservbyport().
* get_osfhandle(), cwait().
* spawnl(), spawnle(), spawnlp(), spawnlpe(), spawnv(), spawnve(),
spawnvp(), spawnvpe().
* nice().
* Under NT only: chown(), getgrgid(), getgrnam(), endgrent(), getgrent(),
setpwend(), getpwent(), endpwent().  Win95 still has these as stubs.

Significantly better signals / exception handling support added.
The kill signal works much better now (control-C works in bash).

Shell scripts now run the shell specified after the #! instead of
always defaulting to /bin/sh.

Opening non-disk files such as com ports no longer check to see
if they are symlinks or executables.

The console title now is set to the name of the running process.

Winsock is now initialized upon app startup.

We moved reent_data from private address space to cygwin.dll.

NT extended attributes are made use of to contain info about
symlink and executable status of files.

Under NT only, utilities mkpasswd and mkgroup will generate a valid
/etc/passwd and /etc/group.

Registry entry is now "Cygnus Solutions" instead of "Cygnus Support".
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