RE: complete newbie Q

["Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 04:52:05PM -0000, Dave Korn wrote:
>> Dave Korn wrote:
>>> porting effort.  (MinGW provides _some_ of the POSIX syscalls, but it's
>>> a massively less-complete implementation than Cygwin.  MSYS provides
>>> more,
>> 
>> ...  but it's not included in the cygwin mingw distribution.)
> 
> MSYS is just a (very) old version of cygwin with some hacks to translate
> path names and a different way of dealing with the mount table.

  I know that!

>  So,
> MSYS will never be included in the cygwin distribution.  It wouldn't
> make any sense to do so.

  Yes it would.  It would allow people to write "gcc -mno-cygwin -lmsys".

  As long as there's going to be a mingw cross-build environment in cygwin at
all, it would be entirely reasonable to distribute libmsys.a next to
libmingw32.a, libmingwex.a, libmingwthrd.a, etc.

  Now, I agree that cygwin isn't mingw, and it would be pointless to attempt
to include mingw-builds of *every* imaginable lib with cygwin, and that people
who want mingw should get mingw, and that the cross-compiler distributed in
cygwin is just a convenience facility and does not attempt to be a
fully-featured dev environment, but even so:

  a) msys /almost/ counts as a core library of mingw, so
  b) it _would_ "make sense" to include it, just as much so as to not include
it, and
  c) any reason for doing so or not doing so isn't to do with the fact that
it's so similar to (being derived from) cygwin, but is to do with the
cost/benefit ratio of including an extra library in the cygwin mingw
cross-environment.

  IOW it's not remotely as daft a suggestion as your words might be taken to
imply.

  PS:  Aren't hippos great?[*]

    cheers,
      DaveK

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=hippos&sourceid=mozilla-search&ie=utf-8&oe
=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&sa=N&tab=wi
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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