OpenSSH & MinGW?

[Ed Phillips]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002 Nicolas.Williams at ubsw.com wrote:

> Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 14:15:09 -0400
> From: Nicolas.Williams at ubsw.com
> To: openssh-unix-dev at mindrot.org
> Subject: OpenSSH & MinGW?
>
>
> I'm interested in building just the OpenSSH clients with MinGW.
>
> I figure that the OpenSSL libraries and just the ssh client should be
> relatively easy to build as they wouldn't require fork()/exec() and the
> like (well, ssh_askpass() uses fork()/exec(), but that's minor).
>
> The other clients, scp and sftp, will require #ifdef hacks so that they
> use the Windows spawn()/CreateProcess() APIs instead of fork()/exec() to
> run the ssh program.
>
> Any other glaring gotchas?

Well, the tty-related stuff would be a headache for starters - an "MS-DOS
prompt" isn't really a tty-compatible entity, except in the DOS
"look-I-can-print-funky-DOS-symbols-and-escape-sequences" sense.  That
problem in itself is probably enough to snuff any urges I might to port to
MinGW.  You really need a terminal emulator to run the ssh client "inside
of".

Also, on Windows there is no "open", "close", etc., but there is "_open",
"_close", etc.,... and some of them have different arguments or omit
arguments.

Basically, there's a lot of hacking you would have to do, at minimum...

> Has anyone done this?
>
> Hmmm, I'd need the MIT krb5 stuff to build under MinGW as well...

I don't know if anyone has tried it with MinGW, but certainly people do
this sort of port to Cygwin (not that it helps you any).

	Ed

Ed Phillips <ed at udel.edu> University of Delaware (302) 831-6082
Systems Programmer III, Network and Systems Services
finger -l ed at polycut.nss.udel.edu for PGP public key