On 15 Jul., 14:17, Francesco Biscani <[email protected]> wrote: > [possibly OT] Out of curiosity, what was the rationale for going for > SAGE on Cygwin instead of MinGW? > > Cheers, > > Francesco.
AFAIR, only the Cygwin environment is able to provide pty's (pseudo tty's) under Windows, which are needed for the pexpect interfaces to work. (These interfaces connect the Sage library with the functionality of e.g. Maxima, GAP, ...) Cygwin also provides a bash environment, with the ability to fork, which is rare under Windows. (MinGW sometimes is accompagnied by MSys for this purpose, but then, MSys is a descendant of Cygwin.) Again, Sage currently depends on this (bash scripts, ...). And then there is signal handling (Cython _sig_on, _sig_off), where Cygwin provides nice abstraction layers, so the current mechanisms used by *nix-ish Sage nicely carry over, resp. no porting efforts are needed (I think there are two "Windows processes" used for each "Cygwin process", just to be able to deal with this signalling stuff). A "native" Windows port is definitely wanted, and on the roadmap for Sage. But that's still a long way to go (rework of pexpect interfaces, etc.) ... Cheers, Georg -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
