From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-07-22T00:44:24+09:00
Subject: Re: One-Click Installer: MinGW? or VC2005?

On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> Then this is a bug with that extension. Anyone who assumes GCC only on
> their extensions is being a platform chauvinist and possibly making
> unreasonable assumptions for you. File a bug.

why is that?  gcc is, far and above, the most platform indepedant compiler in
the world?  and it's free!  how does that make one a chauvinist?

> IMO, RMagick should not be using a sh-based configure script. We should be
> using a Ruby-based configure script. Perl has done this; so should we.

by using sh configure scripts one can often leverage the significant amount of
configureation work a third party lib has already written such as all that the
gsl uses to optimize floating point maths for a particular platform - it's
totally unresonable to expect someone to re-write all that.  ./configure.sh is
easily one of the most complex open source software packages out there - i
pitty the person whose task it is to reproduce it!  ;-)

> I understand that this would make your life easier, but it's not the right
> answer. There *are* better answers than this, and we should take advantage
> of them. The "parent" libraries may be more difficult, but we should bitch
> to the upstream authors, too.

i think my point, as an extension writer, is that i do this for free, have a
wife, kids, 50hr/wk job, 3 dogs, etc.  i do not want people bitching to me.
if i've written something that works using the most platform independant tools
out there i'd like downstream people to contribute to making my software work
- not the otherway around!  in particular when those downstream people are on
a platform whose funding contributes to undermining the toolset i'm using to
provide them free software!  seriously austin, we agree on many things, but do
you really think all the people there contributing code should be required to
do __more__?

> MinGW is ... not the best choice. It's not as nearly as bad a choice as
> cygwin, but it is definitely an inferior choice to VC2005. Here's a
> question: what if we tried to convince Microsoft to build a gcc-wrapper?
> That is, something for VC2005 that can convert gcc command-lines to VC2005
> command-lines automatically? IIRC, the Mars compiler had something similar
> (cl-to-mars converter).

not a bad idea.  however, we still need bison, ar, ld, yacc, make, sh and
friends to truely have a compatible build environment, which is what this
thread is really about.  btw.  i'm not saying the msys approach to shoehorning
windows into being a compatible environment is the __best__ one, but, afaik,
it's by far the __only__ one that has potential to marry mac, *nix, and
windoze while making extensions that require 3rd party software (the majority)
available to the biggest number of users.

kind regards.

-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama