Re: Interix

[Bruno Haible]

[Dropping the Austin Group from the CCs, since Interix does not attempt
POSIX compliance.]

Jason Zions <Jason.Zions at microsoft.com> wrote:
> A few hundred thousand users of applications ported to that environment
> might disagree. Interix and the Vista/WS08 Subsystem for UNIX Applications
> do not include an sa_sigaction member, as you point out, but they don't
> claim to conform to the C Extensions or to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001.

The target audience of gnulib are primarily the developers, not the end users.
The effort that I put into the gnulib support of a particular system does not
depend on the number of end users, but on the number of developers who are
willing to contribute (through bug reports, testing, etc.).

As far as I remember, only 1 person has shown interest in Interix portability
on this mailing list in 5 years. Why the interest in Interix is so low, I can
only speculate. I guess it's because Interix compiled program cannot use the
Win32 API, whereas mingw compiled programs and Cygwin compiled programs can.

If you (or a colleague of yours at microsoft.com) are interested in increasing
the gnulib support for Interix, a good step is to test gnulib's current state:
  1. Create a test directory
       ./gnulib-tool --create-testdir --with-tests --directory=/tmp/testdir
     on a POSIX compliant system (such as Cygwin or Linux).
  2. Transfer the created directory to the target machine.
  3. There, run
       ./configure
       make
       make check
  4. Report all problems.

Bruno