Mozilla 1.3 built on cygwin?

[Randall R Schulz]

Michael,

At 21:32 2003-03-26, Michael F. March wrote:
>>>Jeff,
>>>
>>>Just outta' curiosity, beyond the satisfaction of accomplishing it, 
>>>what would be gained?
>>
>>well you could ssh into your windows machine and run mozilla remotely 
>>from your xterminal ...
>>umm - okay so thats not much of a gain... but...
>
>First off, I have said it before and I'll say it again, Evolution from
>Ximian needs to be ported to Cygwin..
>
>Anyway..
>
>There would be A LOT to be gained from having a Cygwin port of Mozilla.
>
>     1. You could easily hack on features the Windows and Unix source
>         trees if Mozilla ran via Cygwin. Also, you could build Mozilla
>         on Windows without having to use any MSFT products.

OK. Whatever those are.

I'm guessing the MS in MSFT is Microsoft. I don't know what the FT part is.

Building from Cygwin while targeting native Windows APIs would 
presumably be feasible using MinGW and / or "-mno-cygwin", but the 
result would presumably function just as Mozilla compiled with Visual Studio.


>     2. Having a complex GUI app like Mozilla ported to Cygwin could
>         prove to be a stick in which to measure and compare the over
>         all efficiency and performance of Cygwin. If the "native"
>         Mozilla and the Cygwin version performed reasonably the same,
>         then we would know that Cygwin is on track. If the Cygwin
>         version lagged, it would set concrete goals for the
>         Cygwin/XFree team.

That's not going to happen any time soon. XFree86/Cygwin has no 
graphics acceleration. Apart from that, little if anything runs as fast 
through Cygwin as it does on the Win32 API even if GUI operation is 
ignored or irrelevant.

I don't mean this as a criticism, but just a fact. I imagine the 
biggest win would be by getting some graphics acceleration in XFree86.


>     3. I hate where and how Mozilla puts user files under native
>         Windows. The Cygwin port would be better... more like the Linux
>         port.

OK, but that's pretty minor in my book.


>     4. Don't underestimate how great it would be to be able to
>         X in an check your email. Better yet, be able to run more
>         than one user at a time be able to X in and check their
>         email.

If I was willing to use Mozilla for mail, that might be valid. Now 
KMail, that I'd use.


>As a long time Windows Mozilla user, I would welcome a Cygwin version
>with open arms.

Open arms... Hmmm... "Embrace Open Source."


>Finally.. Every major porting effort that Cygwin goes to does not
>kill or hurt Cygwin, it makes it stronger and more functional.

Unquantifiable.

It's clear that bringing otherwise unavailable software to Windows via 
Cygwin is an unqualified win.

However, doing so for software already available on Windows, especially 
when it's not software that integrates with other Cygwin components, 
adds rather less. Take Perl, for example. There's a native Windows port 
and a Cygwin port. But Cygwin Perl is still a win because any Perl 
program can be run in a context of close interaction (pipelines, 
scripts, uniform pathname treatment, etc.) with other Cygwin programs.

 From this perspective, I'd say Cygwin Mozilla would be a rather small 
win. GUI-intensive, non-scriptable applications for X (which does not 
itself run unless the Windows GUI system is running beneath it) add 
rather little when those applications are already available as native 
Windows programs.

And that old saw about "what doesn't kill me ..." is BS, though I 
imagine it's also largely irrelevant when applied to software.


>--
>
><march>
>
>Michael F. March


Randall Schulz 


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