[wine-devel] Re: [wine-devel] Re: Bug 24018 which appears to be a showstopper for running Cygwin on Wine

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2013-07-01 06:13+0100 Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

> [...]In terms of "relative" importance, consider that mingw (both native and cross) GNU toolchain works well, 
> the toolchain part of cygwin is hardly a priority.

Once again you are implying the MinGW GNU toolchain is better than the
Cygwin GNU toolchain without mention of any bug reports from you to
Cygwin to back up that assertion.  Your constant repetition of this
theme made me curious so I looked you up on the web, and it appears
you are a MinGW developer.

If you really are a MinGW developer, I hope your negative attitude
toward the Cygwin toolchain is not typical of such developers.  After
all, even though the Windows GNU toolchain code bases have diverged
between the two groups of developers, there is still a common interest
between MinGW and Cygwin developers regarding getting the GNU
toolchain to work properly on Windows.

You certainly have the right to express your opinion about the Cygwin
toolchain here, and you _might_ even be correct, but I am concerned
you are biased since you appear to be broadcasting anecdotal evidence
without sending in bug reports to Cygwin concerning what you have
found.

And now to get back on topic again, thanks, André, for that reference
to http://wiki.winehq.org/CygwinSupport.  The two points there are
worth repeating:

For Wine, the upside would be:
   * a very good test suite
   * a much more solid implementation of the fundamental Win32 APIs

These same points can be made about MinGW/MSYS and my work on building
software (whose build is configured by my "build_projects" project) on
Wine with that toolchain.  And that work has already contributed to 3
Wine fixes (two of which were regressions introduced in the 1.5.x
series).

However, it should be emphasized that Cygwin is a very much bigger
free software project than MinGW/MSYS.  So it provides a much more
comprehensive and rigourous test of Wine than MinGW/MSYS, and this
will be the case for the forseeable future.  The number of software
projects whose builds are configured by build_projects is growing, but
that number it is still very much smaller than the list of software
builds that are included in the Cygwin distribution.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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