From: "Guy N. Hurst" <gnhurst@...>
Date: 2002-03-19T07:52:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Development of Windows version of Ruby

Phil Tomson wrote:
> 
> Now that we've dumped the cygwin requirement for the Windows version of
> Ruby and new releases are compiled with MSVC it apparently leaves some
> holes in functionality as compared to the Unix versions of Ruby.  For
> example, popen doesn't work anymore on Windows as of the 1.6.6
> release (does fork work?) because we used to rely  on Cygwin for this.
> 

I think this is a difference between Unix and Windows, and
has little to do with Ruby.

> Are there any plans to patch these functionality holes?  Would Mingw help?

I wouldn't expect any.

> I'm just curious, I don't do much on Windows anymore, but I do think that
> some folks will miss some of this functionality and newbies who expect
> that it should be there could be disappointed.
>

As far as I know it *never was* there. Even perl on windows has
to live without fork, notwithstanding the rudementary substitute
they came up with. The closest I got was perhaps spawnv, which
I managed with wxpython, but it still wasn't useful enough at the time.

I am in favor of dumping cygwin in favor of using mswin because
windows is not unix. Render unto windows what belongs to windows,
and unto unix what belongs to unix. Those who use windows are more
disappointed to see the problems cygwin causes, I think, than 
non-windows users are when their unix-based app doesn't fork properly,
for example. 

Even certain things related to processes are
inconsistent between unix versions (linux vs bsd for example), such
that certain ruby methods don't work on both for them, either.
(I say this from an experience I had a year ago).

In short, I am just writing this to cheer for the mswin version :-)


Guy N. Hurst