tchiwam wrote:
Patrick Dawson wrote:
Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
Does anyone have any information on what Gentoo/Cygwin is? Who is in charge of this, and is it really at the stage where we should be recruiting people to work on it? I'm *extremely* wary of the idea of this kind of thing being committed without prior discussion -- there's far more difference between anything we currently have and Cygwin than there is between osx or bsd and linux-gnu, and we know how much work those two are already...
I think Patrick Lauer is the only one who's actually doing stuff with Gentoo/Cygwin at the moment, so ask him. Judging by the extreme lack of activity on the gentoo-cygwin list, I don't think it's nearly at the stage where recruitment should start.
I would think this port would potentially open the biggest market to gentoo, and the scariest one too...
I'm not sure I agree that the market is either big or scary. CygWin is a niche -- Linux folk constrained by corporate policies to run Windows; a fast way to get some open source tools up and running on a Windows system until a native port is available. It *isn't* dual boot, and it *isn't* VMWare Workstation. It *is*, however, gcc, grep, perl, sort, xorg-x11, guile, ruby, apache, postgres, clisp, etc., essentially all compatible with other GNU-based environments.
I work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment. Out of perhaps 150 - 200 software engineers, two that I know of are using CygWin -- myself and another engineer on the same team that builds the same tools I do. I'm sort of a "Johnny Appleseed" of tools where I work; I test out stuff like Gentoo, CygWin, R, ns/nam, etc. at home and sneak them into the lab. :)
In order I would say: -Learn about OSX and "system provided services"
I've come within a gnat's eyebrow of buying a Macintosh on several occasions, mostly because there are quite a few music tools that only run there. However, those tools, or their open source "equivalents", are mostly available under GNU/Linux. When I buy a 64-bit machine I'll take a look at both Macs and AMD-64s (and Intel 64-bit chips if they have anything in my price range). In any event, surely OSX is a bigger market than CygWin.
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