Am Dienstag, den 06.08.2013, 20:54 +0000 schrieb Thorsten Glaser: 
> Ah. Is that amd64-only or will it work with my win2k setup
> on “that laptop from 1999”?

MSYS, even the one bundled by mingw-w64, is and will always be 32-bit
applications. As an aside, please note that the mingw-w64 compiler can
target both i386 and amd64 systems. It merely has "-w64" in its name,
because it can *also* build for amd64, which plain mingw cannot. That's
a bit misleading, I guess. :/

> I mean, sure, as user I might want to install and use latest Cygwin,
> especially if I develop myself, but if I’m an upstream who wants to
> also provide Win32 binaries of his applications, using the old and
> more compatible versions fulfills my user story better.

It has become a maintenance burden. For example, MSYS currently uses
bash 3.x, whereas bash 4 has already been ported to current Cygwin [*].
However, the patch set to achieve does not apply cleanly to MSYS. So you
would have to do the same porting work again for MSYS just because it
lacks behind Cygwin, which is the much more broadly supported system.

- Fabian

[*] I have chosen bash 4 as an example, because it introduces the
globstar "**" pattern, which I got used to.

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