> On Jun 11 12:58, Ray Donnelly wrote: >> I for one am hugely appreciative of all the hard work that Corinna, Kai, >> redhat, the mingw-w64 team and also Alexey has put into both Cygwin and >> MSYS2. >> >> Cygwin and MSYS2 exist for different, mutually exclusive goals. Anything >> we > > I fail to see that. MSYS2 is basically to run a Mingw compiler and to > have a POSIX-like shell. How is that something Cygwin doesn't provide > anyway?!?
Before I begin I would like to note that I have never been a member of cygwin or MSYS development community, but that I was using both in the past as a user (several years each). I am one of those who uses MSYS and who does not like cygwin, so perhaps it might be beneficial to provide my point of view. So keep in mind that what follows is only my subjective opinions what MSYS is good for and why it is good to have it. If you want a minimalistic environment where you can use simple unix-like Makefile or run your configure script, MSYS is exactly that. If your shell script or Makefile works in MSYS, you can have a good confidence it will work for others who use MSYS, and probably even for those who use cygwin or who cross-compile on Linux. On the other side, cygwin is very big, complex and ever-changing beast. It is more like another OS embedded in Windows rather then a shell. Almost no people have the same version of the utils because its multi-version and multi-package nature leads exactly to such diversity. That forces them to manage (install, update) the packages from time to time. Having anything working on your machine says nothing about working it elsewhere because the other one may have some package missing (often difficult to detect which one) or in another version. As a developer I want to be focused on my code and not to continually manage packages in the underlying environment. Exactly such experience taught me to avoid using cygwin. There were also other technical reasons which perhaps may be already be fixed. It is few years ago when I tried cygwin last time. The most prominent of those was the problem with end-of-line settings which tended to be different on some machine causing so many troubles with some utilities etc. I just never encountered such problem with MSYS. Please note I do not say cygwin is useless. I'm sure there are many tasks which require its complexity and where its ability to be (re)configured to one's needs is actually an advantage. But for the tasks I do, it is not. Best regards, Morous ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Mingw-w64-public mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mingw-w64-public
