From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-12-20T00:49:49+09:00
Subject: Re: unix and windows {Re: [ANN] ByteCodeRuby 0.1.3}

Chris Ross wrote:
I believe you missed his point. [I guess] His point was that CYGWIN is "bloody useless" when it comes to doing real windows programming as it is a set of unix apis ported to windows. If you want real programming you need VC or something of that ilk.

Yes, Chris, that's it. Mingw is fine, and I use cygwin for unixy tools that I don't have elsewhere and PalmOS cross-compiling. But I would NEVER use or suggest that someone else use Cygwin for anything designed to interoperate with other Windows programs or not on the command-line.

Emmanuel: yes, but he was being off-topic on this list.

Bollocks. Telling someone to use a non-standard and temperamental development toolset for their platform is inappropriate. It's only slightly better than telling someone to stop using Windows and start using Linux.

There are, IMO, problems with the build assumptions for Ruby on Windows (it assumes that you're using the same environment and toolset as the original builder; which is relatively safe on Unix). The answer is to improve the build process, not to recommend a tool change.

-a
-- 
austin ziegler
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