Hi all, Hopefully this is the right place for this discussion--honestly I'm not sure anymore.
I'm trying to put together a new Software Carpentry "installer" for Windows, to set Windows users up with a more UNIX-y environment in which they can follow along with Software Carpentry lessons seamlessly. The current setup for Windows users is to have them install git for Windows (aka "Git Bash", which includes a bash shell along with many other standard GNU tools), as well as Anaconda for Python, and then the existing SWC "installer" which cobbles together some other tools used by SWC lessons--namely make, sqlite, and nano. There have been a number of problems in the last year with integration between these tools when taking them from different sources. I am trying to put together a new installer based on Cygwin, which provides the MinTTY console (also used by Git Bash) as well as a bash shell, and all the aforementioned tools provided through Cygwin. I have found in my experience with Cygwin over the last year that it provides a very consistent and holistically Unix-y experience on Windows. I hope to have a prototype ready soon for people to test out. But one question I have that's really bothering me is: Is there a *particular* reason we rely on Anaconda for our Python distribution in the lessons? Is there something particular in the existing lesson plans that require Anaconda? I have nothing particular against Anaconda but for the purposes of this installer it would be much simpler and better integrated, I think, to provide Python from Cygwin as well. So I'm wondering if there's any reason not to do that. The same goes for R, but I'm less familiar with how R works or what the implications are there. I will need to test how well a Cygwin shell integrates with an existing R installation... Thanks, Erik _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
