Nam H. Pham

Hi Cygwin friends and users,

after an exceptionally long time of development and testing we’re proud
to release Cygwin’s next major version 1.7.1.

This release is a big leap from the former Cygwin releases in a couple
of ways. For the full list we urge you to read the new User’s Guide,
which you can now find in the usual place:

http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/

There’s a “What’s new” section at

http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ov-new1.7.html

The most important changes are:

- The mount table is no longer stored in the registry. Rather, it’s
stored in /etc/fstab and /etc/fstab/$USER. See
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#mount-table

- Support for pathnames beyond the former 260 chars border. PATH_MAX
is now set to 4096, but Cygwin will try to support even longer paths
up to the Windows maxium of 32767 Unicode chars,

- Multiple Cygwin installations can co-exist on a machine, as long
as you keep them separate.

- Support for IPv6.

- Default character set is now UTF-8, but other character sets are
supported via an improved internationalization support. See
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-locale.html

- Support for new authentication methods which are supposed to improve
changing the user context without password.

- No more support for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me.

======================================================================
IMPORTANT NOTES for those who upgrade from an existing Cygwin 1.5.25
installation:

You *must* upgrade to the latest setup.exe from our main web page at
http://cygwin.com/

Moving the mount table from the registry to /etc/fstab works only
automatically for system mount points. User mount points have to be
taken care of manually, using the /usr/bin/copy-user-registry-fstab
script. See http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#mount-table
======================================================================

Have fun,
Corinna

Source: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2009-12/msg00027.html

Comments: Frankly, I rarely used cygwin. Nevertheless, I find it handy recently when I want to use Perl & Unix commands. Even it’s not as convenient as in Linux, it’s small and enough for my needs. Moreover, I like the ideas creating an Unix environment inside Windows. It’s just like an idea of a wooden horse in Trojan War.