Sometime on 6/16/2011, Michael Richter <ttmrich...@gmail.com> wrote: >(Yes, I know of Cygwin -- and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. > I also know of MinGW/MSYS, but this is a suboptimal solution >for people who don't want to Unixify their boxen.)
For the record, the goal of MSYS is exactly to provide the prerequist tools needed so that unrolling a tarball then saying "./configure; make" can do something sensible on Windows. One key is providing a minimal but complete set of the usual tools (cp, mv, rm, tar, m4, sh, bash, ...) bundled in a way that allows for straight-forward setup. The compilers are MinGW, and generate native Windows executables. Cygwin is a more complete *nix emulation that runs within Windows, and provides a nearly complete *nix experience, including a package manager, X windows, and all the bells and whistles. The problem is that the natural Cygwin compilers build executables that assume that Cygwin is installed, and use its mapping of *nix names of things in preference to Windows names. This results in an environment that is friendly to a full-time *nix user, but is unnecessarily difficult for a normal Windows user. It is possible to build Windows native executables from Cygwin, of course, but that is not the default behavior. In my experience, it is likely that MSYS is sufficient as long as the gross platform differences between unix and Windows are accounted for in the application itself. For example, a program that uses X windows without a cross platform GUI toolkit will be nearly impossible to port to Windows without significant effort, even if you can get its build system compile it there. Fossil's prerequisits are simple and very portable. It's already easy to build it natively on Windows (I do it with MinGW at a normal Command prompt using Gnu Make and the usual suspect tools distributed for Windows by the GnuWin32 project.) It should be straightforward to get a autotools to create a configure script that works with bash as provided by MSYS. Ross Berteig r...@cheshireeng.com Cheshire Engineering Corp. http://www.CheshireEng.com/ +1 626 303 1602 +1 626 351 1590 FAX _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
