On 2013-07-01 06:13+0100 Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
[...]In terms of "relative" importance, consider that mingw (both native and cross) GNU toolchain works well, the toolchain part of cygwin is hardly a priority.
Once again you are implying the MinGW GNU toolchain is better than the Cygwin GNU toolchain without mention of any bug reports from you to Cygwin to back up that assertion. Your constant repetition of this theme made me curious so I looked you up on the web, and it appears you are a MinGW developer.
If you really are a MinGW developer, I hope your negative attitude toward the Cygwin toolchain is not typical of such developers. After all, even though the Windows GNU toolchain code bases have diverged between the two groups of developers, there is still a common interest between MinGW and Cygwin developers regarding getting the GNU toolchain to work properly on Windows.
You certainly have the right to express your opinion about the Cygwin toolchain here, and you _might_ even be correct, but I am concerned you are biased since you appear to be broadcasting anecdotal evidence without sending in bug reports to Cygwin concerning what you have found.
And now to get back on topic again, thanks, André, for that reference to http://wiki.winehq.org/CygwinSupport. The two points there are worth repeating:
For Wine, the upside would be: * a very good test suite * a much more solid implementation of the fundamental Win32 APIs
These same points can be made about MinGW/MSYS and my work on building software (whose build is configured by my "build_projects" project) on Wine with that toolchain. And that work has already contributed to 3 Wine fixes (two of which were regressions introduced in the 1.5.x series).
However, it should be emphasized that Cygwin is a very much bigger free software project than MinGW/MSYS. So it provides a much more comprehensive and rigourous test of Wine than MinGW/MSYS, and this will be the case for the forseeable future. The number of software projects whose builds are configured by build_projects is growing, but that number it is still very much smaller than the list of software builds that are included in the Cygwin distribution.
Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin
Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________
Linux-powered Science __________________________