To be technically precise, there is no "mingw" shell. People primarily use
MinGW either under the MSYS shell, or on the normal Windows command line.
These are the 2 cases that must be supported robustly. I have been doing
all my development under MSYS, so I have probably failed at straight
command line stuff. I thought Chicken used forward slash paths internally
and did conversions at some point, so I've been feeding it forward slashes
in the pathnames.
Using MinGW under a Cygwin shell sounds pathological, kinky, error prone,
unlikely, and not something we should worry about supporting. People use
MinGW to abandon Cygwin, so that they're not tied to its GPL. Yes it is
possible to get some kind of MinGW behavior by passing certain flags to the
*Cygwin* compiler. I don't know much about this and am not going to be
putting any testing time into this. If someone is heavily using Cygwin
with MinGW flags, they can do the support / testing work for this and
contribute it to Chicken.
I'm not convinced that MinGW is always used simply to avoid the GPL. My
understanding is that MinGW is for building 'proper' Windows applications
with Win32 etc. and cygwin is for building unix-y applications with a huge
slow compatibility library to bridge the gulf between Win32 and Posix. In
my opinion, cygwin provides a somewhat nicer environment than MSYS for a
Unix person so it is quite conceivable that someone would want to use cygwin
for the build environment but use MinGW for the compiler / libraries because
they want a proper Windows application. Mind you, I don't really care if
the cygwin / MinGW combo is unsupported as MSYS is sufficient for me to
build chicken and I only need to do that once (for some value of once).
Ian
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