[fpc-devel] Is it possible to remove dependency on cygwin from freepascal ?

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, sakesun roykiatisak said:
> 
> For several years, some of Freepascal utilities always cause troubles
> from cygwin version conflict with my machine main cygwin installation.
> I believe Freepascal package will be a lot more integrated if those
> cygwin utilities can be replace with FPC-based solution.
> Have this idea been considered before ?
> How much effort to accomplish that ? Should I try to do that myself ?

Afaik only GDB (both cmdline as in the textmode IDE) require cygwin. If
these could be replaced with mingw versions, it would be cygwin-less. This
can be seen below:

C:\FPC\2.2.4\bin\i386-win32>grep -i cygwin *
Binary file cygiconv-2.dll matches
Binary file cygncurses-8.dll matches
Binary file cygwin1.dll matches
Binary file fp.exe matches
Binary file gdb.exe matches

Mario Mahardhika already tried to do this, and put his experiences in the
following bugreport:

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=11968

what needs to be done now is duplicate and evaluate this option, since one
of the reasons fpc currently uses 6.2.1 is because that version was known to
work the best. (afaik up to 6.4 has been tried).