From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-03-19T10:25:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Development of Windows version of Ruby

In article <3C966FC9.9170048A@hurstlinks.com>,
Guy N. Hurst <gnhurst@hurstlinks.com> wrote:
>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 :-)
>

Sorry for replying twice, but I just thought of a more concise way to put 
it:
I voted to get rid of cygwin as a dependency for the Windows version of 
Ruby back when we had the poll.  But I didn't think that that meant that 
the functionality we were going to lose would never be replaced (if I 
had known that I may have voted otherwise). 

Phil