On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Georg S. Weber <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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.
It is technically possible to do something like this in Windows (non Cygwin) using the console API. I had a student do a mock-up of this, and it worked, but wasn't so robust/impressive. > (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. rare = impossible, I think. And yes, this fork capability of cygwin is hugely relevant for Sage. > (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, ...). All the pexpect interfaces use fork to get going, by the way. > 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.) ... A "native" windows port used to be on the roadmap. It's definitely not on my roadmap anymore. Just to give a sense of how I'm happier with the Cygwin version of Sage, yesterday I logged in via ssh to one of my winxp cygwin machines, built the brand new Singular spkg (that Martin Albrecht just posted), then built all the relevant changes to the Sage library needed to use this new version of Singular... and it all "just worked". This wouldn't be likely with Microsoft's own compilers... For starters, the Singular developers don't work with those compilers, so the Singular devs will make all kinds of code changes, which would then have to be ported/fixed. -- William > > > 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 > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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
