ANN: Cygnal 2.5.1.98 (Alpha)

[Kaz Kylheku]

The Cygwin Native Application Library project (Cygnal) has reached
its first alpha release by addressing, every one of its current set of
published goals, thereby becoming basically useful.

http://www.kylheku.com/cygnal

With Cygnal, you develop a program in the Cygwin environment as a Cygwin
application, building it to an executable which depends on the cygwin1.dll.

Then you can bundle your executable with a patched version of that DLL
from the Cygnal project. This patched DLL provides "native" behaviors in
various areas, such as path handling, and fixes relevant to this use
scenario.

The Cygnal project extends a warm thank-you to the Cygwin project,
for placing Cygwin under the Lesser GPL, and at the same time bids
good-bye to MinGW.

[Kaz Kylheku]

The Cygwin Native Application Library project (Cygnal) has reached

its second release, a beta release.

http://www.kylheku.com/cygnal

With Cygnal, you develop a program in the Cygwin environment as a Cygwin
application, building it to an executable which depends on the cygwin1.dll.

Then you can bundle your executable with a patched version of that DLL
from the Cygnal project. This patched DLL provides "native" behaviors in
various areas, such as path handling, and fixes relevant to this use
scenario.

This is the last release before
2.5.2: the official Cygnal release based on Cygwin 2.5.2.

Four more issues were identified since 2.5.1.98 and addressed:

* C stdio text streams (streams opened without the "b" mode)
now externally use the Windows format for line termination,
as if they were open with the "t" mode.

* When a Cygnal application tries to spawn or exec
/bin/sh -c <cmd>, Cygnal now intercepts this and translates
it to cmd.exe /c <cmd>. Thus programs which provide access
to the system interpreter in this hard-coded way (rather than
via the system or popen functions) will Just Work (tm)
without modification---provided they don't specifically
depend on the command syntax. For instance, this has been
demonstrated to work with GNU Awk. The unmodified Cygwin build
of GNU Awk supports the use of cmd.exe syntax in pipes, when
run over Cygnal.

* Symbolic creation (the symlink function) now defaults to making
Windows shell shortcuts, rather than Cygwin-specific symlink
files.

* Cygnal now looks for global options which modify its behavior
in the CYGNAL environment variable, rather than the CYGWIN
variable.