Cygwin and MSYS have significantly different goals (even if MSYS is
entirely based on Cygwin).
My understanding is that MSYS is the minimal shell required to run
autotools and get sources from internet from different repositories.
MSYS is about porting Unix programs to Windows without having a Posix
emulation layer, and then (hopefully!) getting those changes up-streamed.
Typically, on MSYS, the executables that are run want to be native Win32
where-as on Cygwin they want to be Posix and this will always be the case
and a problem.
MSYS includes the following changes to Cygwin to support using native Win32
programs:
1. Automatic path mangling of command line arguments and environment
variables to Win32 form on the fly for Win32 applications inside bash.exe
2. Ability to change OSNAME with an environment variable (MSYSTEM) to
change it between MSYS and MINGW32 (so people can add to or fix MSYS
programs should they need to).
3. Conversion of output of native Win32 application output from Windows
line endings to Posix line endings - removing trailing '\r' symbol - in
bash.exe so that e.g. bb=$(gcc --print-search-dirs) works as expected.
4. Replaced Cygwin symlinks with copying (we can investigate an option for
mklink symlinks on Vista and above but this is a topic for discussion -
MSYS compliant software tend to work around most ln-as-cp issues when
possible anyway).
5. Add "-W" option to bash.exe's pwd command for compatibility with old
MSYS.
6. Perhaps remove /cygdrive prefix to simply typing paths. Mostly this is
to retain compatibility with MSYS-enabled software that makes assumptions
about /c/ being equivalent to C:/
7. Minor changes to other userland programs (such as Perl so it reports
msys as $^O) which again helps to retain compatibility.
The reality is that MSYS exists and it's really old and getting in the way
of developers, and MSYS2 is needed to replace this. I'm surprised therefore
at the negative reaction, but really hope that MSYS2 can be viewed as a
complimentary off-shot from Cygwin (even *hopefully* by the Cygwin
developers!).
Regards,
Alexey.
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