cygwin patches for gnulib relocation code [Was: Re: Bug in libiconv?]

[Charles Wilson <cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm>]

On 1/27/2011 12:08 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Cygwin Versions prior to 1.7.7 are not support anyway.

This is merely semantics. You're saying that *the cygwin project* does
not support older cygwins.  However, that doesn't mean *other projects*
have the same policy -- see, for instance, upstream git.

> The changes
> should work with versions at least back to 1.7.2 and I don't care the
> least for older versions.  There's no reason to clutter the code to
> support old, unsupported Cygwin versions.  There are existing, older
> builds of libiconv available for them.

But I'm not (really) talking about libiconv. I'm talking about a
proposed patch for gnulib -- which is a *source based repository* meant
to be imported *as source* into other projects, so there are no "old
builds" of gnulib.  So, it's a policy question for the gnulib
maintainers: what is their "too old; we don't care" horizon for cygwin?

Since the *point* of gnulib is to provide workarounds and "better"
implementations for missing and broken functionality on (old?)
systems...I doubt gnulib's policy is "we will follow cygwin's lead and
only support whatever is the current version of cygwin".  OTOH, since
the goal of gnulib is to provide source for builds that happen *today*,
maybe they don't care to help folks trying to build new tools on
dead-and-buried cygwin.  I don't know.

Eric (Blake), you're active on the gnulib list. Care to comment?

--
Chuck

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