On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 11:46 AM Cyril Arnould <cyril.arno...@outlook.com> wrote:
> Hi! I was wondering if there's a possibilty for GNU findutils to > officially start supporting MinGW-w64. To set your expectations, this email isn't going to answer that question. > It has been ported before as > part of both the GnuWin32 and ezwinports projects, those however are > based on by now rather dated versions of findutils which come from > before the introduction of the fts based find command. > It probably also works/worked under Cygwin. > > Last year, I have worked on a port of the newest findutils release > based off the patches in the ezwinports project. As far as I'm aware, > the issues that the patches address are not covered by Gnulib as of > yet. The changes can still quite easily be rebased onto master in case > you want to take a look: > > https://github.com/cyrilarnould/findutils This repo is a fork of jamesyoungman/findutils:master but that is a (frequently very out of date) mirror of the real findutils git repository, which is on Savannah, not github (see https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=findutils for details). If you'd like to discuss next steps, the first thing to do is rebase your changes against the current git master branch on Savannah. I haven't looked at your changes, since right now you're about 58 changes behind Savannah, so there would be lots of distracting irrelevant diffs. > I'm quite happy with how it turned out in terms of functionality, but > some of the changes are quite hacky and probably need polishing before > they could be included. Me being very inexperienced in C programming > and the workflow around autotools didn't help. Some newer features I > just skipped because I did not know how I would implement them; they > were not around in the ezwinports version either. > I think it's unlikely that the findutils maintainers will accept "hacky" changes for the benefit of MinGW if it compromises the code quality for other systems (e.g. GNU/Linux distributions). I would expect there to be a great many difficulties with such a project. For example, Windows filenames don't conform to the expectations of POSIX-like systems, which is what the find implementation expects. Some differences will be obvious but others not. For example AIUI in Windows, C:\WINDOWS\NUL and C:\USERS\JAMES\NUL are the same file, but it would likely be difficult to get the expected result with -samefile. I think I get the idea of why someone would want to use the MinGW GCC to build programs, but what's the advantage of using a version of find built with MinGW instead of using WSL, for example?
