From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-11-06T12:24:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Win32 support issues

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lyle Johnson" <lyle@users.sourceforge.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 11:22 AM
Subject: Re: Win32 support issues


> Gavin Sinclair wrote:
>
> > What does this mean?  What Win32 support issues, apart from fork(), are
there?
>
> I would only answer that, if you don't get any specific answers there
> probably are no Win32 support issues ;)
>
> It has always been a little curious to me that people consider the lack
> of fork() -- a Unix-specific system call -- to be a "bug" in the Win32
> version of Ruby. I wonder if those people consider the fact that Ruby's
> Win32API module doesn't work under Linux a bug?

Point taken. I guess I'd say that so much of Unix
was stolen for Windows (badly) that fork() should
have been stolen also.

Actually, I only think of it as an inconvenience,
not a bug. And it's because I spent two years
using the Cygwin version (not installing Cygwin
itself, just the DLL) and I could do fork() and
popen3() just fine. I only lost it when we went
native. (And I'm not complaining -- I gather
there were good reasons for that, but it was
mostly a step backward for me.)

<digression>
I always said that MS-DOS was the bastard child
of Unix and CP/M. DOS got its hierarchical
dir structure from Unix. (And I knew a woman
who actually knew the original PC-DOS team at
IBM. There was a guy on it who, in true IBM
fashion, argued vehemently for a flat file
space!)

And DOS got its drive names from CP/M. Can you
imagine how much less painful DOS would have
been with mount points?
</digression>

But the good thing about minimal support for
Ruby on Windows is that it's driving me more
and more into the Linux camp. :)

Hal