Re: Installing VIM installs lots of other stuff

[Daniel Jensen <jensend at iname dot com>]

cgf, I've been using cygwin off and on for ~14 years and I'm aware what 
it is and is not. Getting defensive and huffy over a rhetorical (not 
technical/internal) comparison of cygwin to other "collections of tools 
which provide [with varying completeness] a Linux look and feel 
environment for Windows" isn't productive. Nor is making unwarranted 
assumptions about my ignorance.

On my own primary machine I've always had a more complete cygwin install 
and been glad to be able to, among other things, use the full toolchain 
to build plenty of software that would not have worked with msys/mingw 
or whatever. But on my other machines, or for other people, I have 
frequently installed a fairly minimal cygwin environment. Much of the 
use these installs have seen would have been adequately met by many of 
the "bundle of win32 binaries" offerings which include a shell. Often, 
however, that wouldn't suffice due to compatibility gotchas or to a 
missing tool. In such a situation cygwin is doing quite a similar task 
to what these bundles are intended to do, it's just doing it better and 
more completely; the internal differences are not particularly relevant 
to the user. Hence the 'on steroids.' Almost all of the other people I 
know who use cygwin use it exclusively in this way. Not everybody wants 
the full build toolchain, every scripting language under the sun, etc.

"Being more like linux" is not a well-defined goal, and it cannot 
provide any useful guidance in making decisions like this, since for any 
optional dependency you can find distributions which went either way. 
Plenty of minimalist distributions out there, and the popularity of 
different approaches has fluctuated over the years. (Remember when 
gentoo and USE flags were all the rage?)

"Being more like the latest Fedora" or the like would be well-defined 
and give concrete guidance, but I can't think of any reason why it would 
be a reliably good match for your goals for the project or for users' needs.

I really appreciate your leadership and all the work you and others have 
done over the years. I am not here to bicker. You folks have to make 
tradeoffs and decisions in trying to meet competing goals and disparate 
users' needs with limited resources, and of course minimalists' concerns 
won't always win out. Even in this case with vim, where providing for 
both the minimal and the full-fat is quite possible and is a route taken 
by many distros, spending effort on that may not be the right use of 
cygwin resources. I don't pretend to know. But I do think that folks are 
unnecessarily dismissive of this type of concern. Rick's concern really 
is relevant, and the decisions and tradeoffs can be made without being 
dismissive.

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple