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Building NetBSD Under Cygwin on Windows XP, PPC
Dan writes "John Gordon has completed a set of changes to the NetBSD build infrastructure that allows him to build at least two architectures (i386 and ibmnws platform, a PowerPC box) under Cygwin/Windows XP Home Edition and PowerPC. He has made a CVS patch for Cygwin, and provides instructions on the required configuration of Cygwin to avoid a problem with directory name clashes due to the case insensitive file system on Windows."
Can't call, its busy!
Will try again later... Ohhh, BSD's.... I'm lonely too!!!
No I didnt spell check this post...
Think like an embedded systems company that wants to take advantage of NetBSD's excellent support for platforms like Hitachi Super-H, StrongArm, MIPS, and embedded PowerPC, but are themselves a Windows shop, and you'll see why this is a win...
Remember that there are a lot of prototyping and testing tools out there that are currently windows-only, and it's thus a lot easier to sell some of these shops on OSS as a target OS than as a desktop platform...
This may well change, but we aren't there yet...
One reason I can think of is that, if you have fast Windows XP box and some weird machine running NetBSD which is not so fast, then using the latest and greatest sometimes requires compiling... Another reason is that in principle NetBSD should compile on any POSIX platform, I was not enough brave to dig into details why this was not possible earlier...
Next time you want to ask that question, remember: This is slashdot. We do things because we can. In this case, as some of the other replies have pointed out, there are some practical uses. One that hasn't been pointed out is building under cygwin to run under bochs. Just because you wouldn't do it doesn't mean someone else can't.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Even with cygwin you cannot create or properly handle a file with a reserved name, such as aux, nul, com1, con, et cetera. So when you try to extract the "aux" dir, or files like aux.h or aux.c which are fairly commonly used names in source trees apparently, tar chokes and fails to extract the file. In order to compile some software I've had to extract files like aux.h as winaux.h (arbitrary filename I chose) and then edit makefiles, cfiles which include it, etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"