Am Montag, den 22.07.2013, 17:16 +0000 schrieb Thorsten Glaser: 
> Right. It’s pretty hard to develop _for_ MSYS really, but stock
> (Unix) mksh builds against it out-of-the-box thanks to, I think,
> RT from IRC. (If I mis-remember, sorry.)

I cannot confirm from my own experience. Since it is forked off from
Cygwin, most of the patches that apply to Cygwin do also apply there. It
is a bit hard to actually *find* the build environment, though. :)

> With MSYS I’d rather bundle (Unix) mksh built against MSYS into
> their distfiles (it’s mksh which is the stand-alone, separate,
> portable thing that can be bundled with others, not the other
> way around).

I just meant to suggest supplementing mksh/Win32 with (a subset of) the
MSYS tool set as a replacement for the outdated UnxUtils.

> It will, yes, but this is half-way orthogonal to mksh/Win32,
> which fits with people not wanting to install half a Unix
> environment. (Basically, if you consider “something like Cygwin”
> you can just build stock Unix mksh for it; this will then use
> its normal console I/O for example, whereas mksh/Win32 will use
> the WinAPI functions – but (quick idea of mine, didn’t talk with
> Michael about it yet) it could use the wide character versions
> of those APIs and just present it to edit.c appropriately,
> instead of having to deal with codepages and stuff.)

Even UnxUtils and GNUWin32 are "something like Cygwin", because they are
not native Win32 builds but rely on compatibility layer libraries that
you have to carry around with them. They are just better hidden from the
user than in Cygwin or MSYS: UnxUtils has all tools linked statically
against the Downhill library and GNUWin32 hides the LibGW32C runtime
somewhere in their install directories. -- I don't know, however, how
these libraries handle drive letters, line endings or even $HOME on
Win32. There will be differences...

There are only a handfull of GNU utilities that can be natively built on
Windows without the help of such compatibility libraries. One of them is
e.g. make, though with a severly reduced feature set, bundled as
mingw32-make with MinGW. Other examples should be e.g. grep. Some of
them are even shipped with FreeDOS in the GNU/ directory, but they won't
run on NT-based Windows OS anymore.

> I made it to my personal goal to get rid of ash in all its
> variants; busybox’ ash is about middle of the bad-worse-worst
> playing field though. I think mksh fills the place of an sh
> component pretty well. (And indeed, Android uses it alongside
> their “toolbox” and mksh can be used as “beastiebox”’ shell
> component.)

I am not that religious about the choice of my shell. :) I use what my
distro installs for me if it works for me -- bash does.

Cheers,

- Fabian


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