--- On Mon, 1/7/13, Alan W. Irwin irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca wrote: ... 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.
...
Look. You have been advised a few times, that it is possible and even easy to bypass installation-related problems and been given brief instructions on how to do so; you have also been told, *many times*, and *by the cygwin developers*, that you are just encounter one problems out of many, and there are more problems to come, in the thread you posted to the cygwin mailing list.
Going personal and accusing others of being biased is not a way of getting help. If you have bothered to look it up as you claim to do, while I have a formal association with mingw, I have made absolutely no contribution to mingw at all, ever; whereas I have made some patches available, etc to cygwin's GNU findutils (merged into coreutils eventually), LaTeX, emacs/xemacs, over a decade ago. My history with cygwin is about twice as old as my association with mingw. That's a matter of public record.
If you bother to look further, the main reason is really that cygwin is a commercial entity - part of Redhat now, but was a privately-own company until 13 years ago when Redhat acquired part of it. Formal membership to cygwin has always been different from how formal membership to mingw operates, for that very reason; and that I live locally to where that company was, (and the part of cygwin that Redhat choose not to buy, still is), and probably know or have met some of the cygwin developers in person. I don't have the fortune to meet/know many, but they have my respects.
The cygwin people would have told you the exact same thing: running mingw on wine is fair easier and more straight-forward, and there are very simple technical reasons why that is the case; and that cygwin is not mingw, and there are important difference where wine is concerned. You seem to assume the difference between cygwin and mingw is small - they are not, and really a world apart, as far as wine is concerned.
Going via exaggeration/sensationalist ("showstoppers") or personal attack is not going to win you any help. FWIW, on the latter point, few are interested in reading a 20-line introduction about your life (or lack of it) every time at the bottom of your posts. That's another thing that put people off from helping you.