On 2013-05-19 21:06-0000 David Cole wrote:
Disclaimer: I have found (over the years) the Cygwin environment to
be ridiculously, enormously slow and frustrating, and have literally completely given up on it as a realistic development environment. I personally do not use it or install it, EVER. It’s probably been 3-4 years since I had one of my machines that had any form of Cygwin on it.
Hi David (off list again but this time with CC to Bill): Would you be interested in working on a MinGW/MSYS Windows distribution of free software as an alternative to Cygwin? The reason I ask this is there are some ~500 Linux distributions (mostly put together by small all-volunteer teams who are in it for the interest rather than for any money), and compared to that only one (Cygwin) windows distribution of free software seems like a ridiculously low number. From your above strong complaints about Cygwin, perhaps it is time there was at least one strong competitor for Cygwin in the Windows distribution arena? Whether such distributions are source or binary, they are an enormous help to developers since they guarantee binary compatibility (all packages built with the same version of the tool chain) with correct dependencies between all packages. Linux developers understand this distribution concept and therefore use and support hundreds of different Linux distributions (mostly binary distributions but there are also many source distributions for Linux as well). For some reason, Windows developers do not get this distribution concept yet (perhaps because of the deficiencies of Cygwin), but I think Windows developers would find even a source distribution script to be quite a convenience since the alternative is build their own collection of required packages (like I have had to do recently with my Wine platform) without any guidance on download locations for source files, how to build those packages from source, and the dependencies between those packages. Of course, another alternative is to download binary versions of Windows software but that introduces concerns about binary incompatibility issues for libraries. Note there is already a http://mingwrep.sourceforge.net/ project that had the goal of producing a Windows binary distribution based on MinGW, but development stopped in 2003 with insufficient free software packages built so I think it would be better to use the potentially much more comprehensive source-distribution script idea instead that I describe below. Putting together a Windows source distribution is not that much work since you don't have to worry about a kernel or initialization scripts as you do in the Linux case and you don't have to provide bandwidth for downloading either source or binary versions if you just use a build script. The required build tool chain is already provided by MinGW/MSYS (supplemented by CMake for now although I imagine that will be distributed as part of MSYS at some point). So Windows source distribution script work consists principally of documentation of how to download the tool chain (i.e., use the MinGW/MSYS automatic installer and download CMake) and creating a script to allow users to build desired packages for themselves in a consistent way. That script would collect download location, build (whether CMake or autotools-based), and dependency information for every important free software package and would also automate the build of the free software packages the users desire. I am thinking of implementing this idea using the Python-based jhbuild package (developed originally to organize builds of the many different gtk-associated software packages on Linux and Windows) since I have some experience using jhbuild and thought it was a well-designed tool to help users build software packages. But obviously another alternative for this job would be an overall CMakeLists.txt file. So the source distribution script idea is ultimately quite simple. It is similar in concept to Linux source distributions (where users download source and build all their desired packages), but it is actually simpler than those because it only documents locations where source can be downloaded and doesn't actually provide that source download itself. Eventually I might want to move to a binary distribution as well for maximum convenience to Windows developers, but that would require a lot of bandwidth which would likely exceed SourceForge limits. So I would like to start small with just a well-configured build script containing relevant download, build, and dependency information for the many different free software packages that currently build on Windows. Let me know what you think of the source distribution script idea for Windows. 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 __________________________ -- Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake
