From: ajm@... (Andy Moreton) Date: 2001-10-31T20:16:15+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:23933] Re: Ruby's use of cygwin and commercial use! feoh@fourfuzzies.org (Awash in a Sea of Entropy) wrote in : >On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Armin Roehrl wrote: > >> Dave, maybe you want to setup a "vote" for that on rubygarden. >> >> I vote for mingw. >> Armin >> >> > >> > Should the InstallShield version switch to mingw? We'd lose fork and >> > some popen functionality, but we'd also lose the cygwin issues. > >I vote mingw. cygwin is a great tool but is more trouble than it's >worth. I'd prefer Ruby to be a more 'generic' Win32 platform when running >under Windows, and as it stands every time I install Ruby on a new system >I have to fight with cygwin1.dll issues because the Ruby install conflicts >with my current cygwin installation. > >-Chris I suspect that this endless "me too" stuff will not provide anything useful. For ruby on Windows there will I suspect be two kinds of people: those who want a native Win32 world, and those who want a Cygwin based Unix-like world. For ruby to be successful on Windows and to have the widest appeal, solutions to both groups desires are needed. For the people who want a Unix-like world, the simplest solution is to ensure that Ruby is built and packed into a tarball (.tar.bz2) for distribution using the normal Cygwin setup.exe download/install tool. Runy builds cleanly under Cygwin, so all that is required is for someone to volunteer to build and update the Cygwin distribution of Ruby. For other people wanting to use ruby on Windows, a native Win32 port is required. Due to the differences in APIs, filesystem & process semantics etc this is not trivial, but it does require effort to achieve. Whether the code is built using Mingw or MSVC is not terribly important: it's the porting that makes it harder to achieve. The ruby community can and should maintain both of these Windows versions. New users will probably want a native version. Cygwin users will probaly want to have a ruby they can use for scripting in Cygwin instead of perl etc. And some of people may fall into both camps at different times. So give everyone a choice, and do _both_. AndyM -- Virata, Unit 230 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge CB4 0WB, UK http://www.virata.com/ Tel: +44 1223 707400 Fax: +44 1223 707447