On 2013-06-29 11:57+0100 Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
--- On Sat, 29/6/13, Alan W. Irwin irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca wrote:
...
The Mingw GNU toolchain works wells under wine. The
cygwin GNU toolchain don't, the last time I checked.
That may be true, but the best way to make that point about the Cygwin GNU toolchain is with official Cygwin bug reports rather than asserting stuff here in an anecdotal way.
Anytime that a piece of windows software (including Cygwin) works on windows but not on wine, is a wine problem.
No question. In fact I stated bug reports to Cygwin would probably only be taken seriously if they included a demonstration of the problem on the Microsoft version of Windows.
The fact that the such software developers (cygwin people) are nice enough to respond and adjust their software (cygwin) to fit a *flaw in wine* does not make the problem less a wine one.
This statement misrepresents what has recently occurred with regard to bug 24018. Arjen Markus's bug report demonstrated the Cygwin fork problem on Microsoft Windows. Because of that the Cygwin developers were quickly able to verify and fix the problem.
The various problems of running cygwin in wine are already
well-documented - just do a search on wine's bugzilla (there are over a dozen of those).
Those have been mentioned before here, and I have looked at them. Cygwin is a very large collection of software so the number of bugs that are reported does not seem excessive to me, and for my personal needs (building and testing software on the Cygwin platform) I will only be using a subset of Cygwin so I may avoid encountering some of these bugs. Furthermore, some of these bugs (e.g., problems resizing a GUI) are not showstoppers, and most of them are quite old. At the same time the latest Wine is far superior to Wine-1.4 so some of those bugs may have just disappeared. I hope to find out about the actual status of Cygwin on Wine bugs once I can get setup.exe to work on Wine.
So the mere fact that the installer does not work correctly, is just
another such problem.
That's been covered already. We obviously disagree on this issue.
Also, running cygwin on wine, compared to other windows software
which has no unix/linux equivalents, is hardly a priority.
That is obviously personally true for you. And for my personal needs Cygwin on Wine is a "would be nice" software build and test platform. That is, it is actually a medium to low priority for me since I already have plenty to do extending my builds and tests of free software on the MinGW/MSYS/Wine platform to additional software packages.
But our personal needs are not what is important here. From the more general perspective any problems running open-source software on Wine should be easier to debug (since all the details of the exact Windows system calls are known) than trying to debug problems with running proprietary software (e.g., some random game) on Wine where you have to guess at the details. As an illustration of that, three times during the 1.5.x series I have found Wine bugs or regressions as a result of running open source software on Wine. (Thankfully, all of those have been fixed by the Wine developers.) Cygwin is the largest distribution of open-source software that runs on Windows. It follows that Cygwin represents a good opportunity to find and fix Wine issues.
In sum you have expressed your opinions on Cygwin and Wine and I have mostly disagreed with those opinions. Therefore, I think we have covered everything, and it is time to call a halt to this side-topic. So from now on my contributions to this thread will focus on the original topic which is problems in running setup.exe on Wine, i.e., bug 24018, and I urge you to do the same.
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 __________________________