From: Tom Pollard <tomp@...>
Date: 2006-10-29T02:33:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Another nail in CygWin's coffin (attached)


On Oct 28, 2006, at 12:57 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> On 10/28/06, Tom Pollard <tomp@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> On Oct 27, 2006, at 5:43 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> > Austin is basically right -- *nobody* should use CygWin as a  
>> Windows
>> > development platform/IDE/whatever.
>> Actually, I think Cygwin is a pretty reasonable platform for porting
>> Unix apps to Windows.  It made it possible for my company to use our
>> Unix build system (make files and shell scripts) under Windows more
>> or less directly, without any radical changes.
>
> So. Is your company's product open source? Because if it isn't, and
> you're distributing it, you're violating the GNU GPL for Cygwin1.dll.

Thanks for your concern, but I didn't say we were using the Cygwin  
DLL.  We're using the Cygwin shell and Cygwin tools to build our  
software as regular Win32 apps using Microsoft & Intel compilers;  
there's no compatibility layer, beyond what we created ourselves (and  
not much was required).  The point was, Cygwin lets us do that with  
the same build scripts and makefiles that we use for the Unix  
builds.  For the first Windows port we did, we used a Visual Studio  
project that was maintained in parallel with the Unix makefiles; it  
seemed like a good idea at the time, because it was the "Windows  
way".  It was a nightmare to maintain, however, and less transparent  
and flexible than our Unix build system.  Using Cygwin lets us work  
from the same code base, using the same build system, on all  
platforms.  All of our Unix test scripts run under Cygwin, as well.   
There was a little work required to get things to work seemlessly,  
but it really works quite well.  It's not perfect, and we've kept our  
eyes open for better alternatives, but the ones we've looked at  
seriously (like 'Services for Unix') seem to have worse problems than  
the Cygwin-based system.

TomP