Documentation

[Gary Fletcher <gary dot fletcher at telinco dot net>]

Hello

I felt I must write to you in order to discuss my dissapointment with
your cygwin and gcc product.

I am a Unix developer and have recently found a need to develop DLLs in
order to call C functions from Oracle Forms.  I have never produced DLLs
before and so required a simple method of doing this.  I was informed by
a friend, a solid Linux user, about your GCC compiler and Cygwin Bash
environment.  I was obviously delighted with the prospect of development
on a Unix type environment for windows systems.

How wrong I was.

I wrote my C file, (in wordpad as there is STILL no editor available
with cygwin even after all its incarnations), followed the, so called,
user manual as to how to produce the library as a DLL but to no avail.
No matter how I tried I could not produce a DLL, I could not even finish
of the first line of your compilation instructions without failing on
the entry point - where does it go?  In the myprog.c, in the mydll.c?
who can say - your "user manual" certainly cannot.

Also the manual states, and I quote:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note that we linked with -e _rdll_init@12. This tells the OS what the
DLL's "entry point" is, and this is a special function that coordinates
bringing
the dll to life withing the OS. The minimum function looks like this:

 #include <windows.h>

 int WINAPI
 rdll_init(HANDLE h, DWORD reason, void *foo)
 {
   return 1;
 }

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please tell me where -e _rdll_init@12 is mentioned before in the
documentation?  should it read -e, mydll_init@12?  I just ask because I
left my psychic abilities at home when I read this the other day and so
was unable to access the writers mind in order to discover the true
nature of this passage - from chapter 4:

http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/cygwin-ug-net/cygwin-ug-net.html

As I am aware User manuals are read by people who have very little idea
of the subject matter, therefore the need to read.  Yours seem to be
written for an expert who has no need for the material in the first
place, therfore no care has been taken to content.

The upshot of this is that myself and my company has decided to use
visual C++ from mircosoft in order that we can produce DLLs.

Please get your house in order otherwise Mr Gates will be able to sleep
easily in his bed.

I look forward to your reply..please use sentences that can be
understood by a Unix programmer.

Yours C++edly

Gary Fletcher
Senior Analyst/Programmer
Telinco Ltd