Hmm, for application development, especially in cases where existing makefilery, autowhatever etc strongly is geared towards gcc and the rest of a GNU toolchain, sure.
But for driver development? Windows drivers are by definition platform specific, you aren't going to be using cross-platform sources and build mechanisms for them anyway, are you? So what are the benefits in using an "open" toolchain? For drivers, why not just use Microsoft's tools?
Legitimate points and I would say there are valid reasons for using either/both toolchains for driver development. I'm by no means an expert in either application development or driver development and part of this process is figuring out a workflow that works for me. One of the things that I have been frustrated with when it comes to "cross platform" open source projects is that nearly every one I have tried to build in a Windows environment does not work as advertised. Most open source software seems to ascribe to the "configure && make && make install" autotools philosophy which doesn't always translate well to the MSYS/MinGW environment. This is especially true of projects that include drivers (one particularly painful example was OpenVPN who has developed a Windows port of the TAP driver that I wanted to use in a project of mine).
So as I start to put myself on the developer side of code rather than the consumer side, I want to arrange my projects so that they are as much platform and development environment agnostic as possible. So it is more about keeping flexibility if others want to use my projects for something. The driver code should work with the Windows DDK, but it would be nice if I could get similar results without it. I'm still too ignorant of Windows driver development and my newly functional MinGW-w64 DDK to know what functionality pitfalls lay ahead. What my drivers probably don't need to do is take advantage of any super specific Windows (or Linux) driver framework type features since I would probably be developing similar drivers for both Linux and Windows.
So if anyone has any examples of what wouldn't work I would be happy to hear them.
Kyle
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